Google Cloud Platform – A High Level Overview of Anthos

Most enterprises require networking, storage, and compute on multiple clouds and their respective data centers.   Securing and operating your existing application and developing and deploying your new applications across all those cloud distributions and data centers makes it harder to get centralized visibility and manage those resources. This is where GCP Anthos comes in.

If the distribution of the resources is done across various cloud platforms, in all of those platforms it would be required to manage their respective infrastructures. Let’s suppose we use containers in the cloud and develop applications on GCP and AWS. Regardless of the platform, we will be needing Policy enforcement across our IT footprint.

To manage this across platforms we will need a monitoring and logging system. And we need to integrate our data into meaningful categories like Business Data, Operational Data, and Alerts. Further, we might need to optimize, automate, set policies, or SLOs using the Alerts and operational data.  In addition to that, we will be performing troubleshooting and deploying 3rd party applications through the same data. In order to act on a specific part of the system would require digging into each tool for Policy enforcement,  Securing services, Orchestrating containers, and managing infrastructure.

All of this in addition to the cost of building and deploying our applications.

Now consider performing all this in a hybrid and multi-cloud landscape. It becomes very complex quickly. At this point, the application developers and admins would require manual cluster by cluster management, data collection, and information synthesis. With this state of complexities, it’s difficult to stay current to understand business implications and to ensure compliance. Not to mention the difficulty onboarding a new hire.

Anthos helps to solve all these challenges.

Features of Anthos:

The following are the key features of Anthos:

• Similar infrastructure Management consistency
• Container management
• Service management
• Policy enforcement

As a result of all those features, we can get observability from one single monitoring and logging system including business data, operational data, and alerts. 

With these data, we can optimize, automate, or set policies and SLOs. It also provides a machine learning model for automates suggestions.  The Machine learning Model takes this information and makes recommendations. We can use those recommendations to make decisions and apply them across various management layers as shown below:

Wish this was as simple as that. We might also need to enforce different policies across different regions and also have applications at different stages of devolvement with each needing different permissions in the production environment. Some parts of our work may need more security. This is where Environs come in.

Environs are the way to create logical sets of underlying Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which platform these clusters live on. By considering, grouping, and managing sets of clusters as logical environs, we can think about and work with our applications at the right level of details for what we need to do, be it bossiness insight over the entire system, setting for a development environment or troubleshooting data from a specific cluster.

Using Environs each part of the functional stack can take declarative directions about configuration, compliance, and more.

Anthos provide the administrators with a single place to manage their landscape including policy control and market access. This significantly reduces person-hours in management, enforcement, discovery, and communication. It also provides the administrators an out of the box structured view of the entire system including services, clusters, and more. It also simplifies their view and management, so they can improve security, use resources more efficiently, and demonstrate measurable success.