So what does "Google Cloud's fully managed Anthos" do in non-marketing speak? I'm not exactly sure what a "multi-cloud and hybrid application platform" providing "agility and flexibility" is supposed to do for me as a "born-in-the-cloud digital native or a traditional enterprise."
It allows you to manage a Kubernetes cluster from GCP that can have resurces mixed from both on-prem and google services (now you can also have pods on AWS).
For on-prem you'll need a WMWare hypervisor on your servers.
Why this is useful?
- Regulation: some workloads can be run only on-prem due to regulation (for instance, in Spain you can only process gambling data in the same region/comunidad autonoma you have the business).
- Cloud offloading of K8s workloads - you can workloads onprem off-peak and mixed loads cloud+onprem on peak times.
- Google Cloud Marketplace : you can deploy solutions from GCP Marketlplace on Anthos (that is, on your hardware, now also on other clouds).
- (now) Onprem + Multicloud workloads: Multicloud is hard. Not just having to know well how stuff works on each cloud, but also having to deal with rough interactions between clouds (even with k8s).
The deal breaker for my for me is the VMware component. That licensing is too costly and a silly move imo as if they could do this without that hypervisor and use something free like Xen or KVM they’d have a ton more adoption.
Google plans to have Anthos on bare metal by year's end.
For me that's one of the biggest adoption barriers because unless you already have that VMware licences, you'll have to burn a lot of CapEX to run Anthos.
I hope they don't make us pay for both the bare metal license and the by-cpu license (or it is a _very_ small amount).
Disclaimer: I work for GOOG and my opinions are my own
My understanding is that Anthos is a multi cloud platform which essentially enables you to run managed Kubernetes on-prem, in GCP, and other public clouds. You can then run other Google Cloud services, such as Cloud Run, on your own hardware or in other clouds in addition to GCP
Would have been nice if they could have mentioned this in that 1200 word post. Sometimes we criticise folks who read the comments before the link, but crappy links like this train us to do that.
I disagree. Consider it the other way - it is common wisdom to keep broad communications simple enough for a 5 year old to understand. It follows that even marketing speak needs to be so simple that 5 year olds (us, engineers) can understand. Especially so when we are the fortunate users.
Thank you. Searching for anthos and istio got me the info I needed. Istio, when finally configured, is pretty fantastic. Leveraging it for multi cloud clusters is already possible so a service that streamlines that feels like a natural step.
Terrible blog post. Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out.
> Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out.
Unfortunately not even Googlers are immune to the draw to elite signalling by drowning your copy in industry jargon without ever getting to the point.
I see this a lot on hastily-composed GitHub Readmes and "rocket-launch" startup landing pages, but it's a shame it also happens to a company whose name is globally recognized.
I don't feel like that's why we all sometimes do this (though that might be an inside view and I might really be signalling along with everyone else.)
I feel like the internal thought-process that motivates this kinds of inside-baseball writing is twofold (depending on the stage of the project):
- early on: "the only people who could possibly care about something this new are people with the exact problem it solves, who stumbled onto it when jamming google full of enough keywords that there are zero other results; they already know what this does before reading; and they just want to confirm that it isn't fatally flawed. They're deploying this project in anger. (Of course they are; if they didn't desperately need it, they'd never rely on something so early in development!)"
- later on: "We're selling this to customers. We've picked a specific target market that has specific use-cases and needs, and we try to think about things the way they think about things 100% of the time, because talking to those people is what gets us money. We don't do any inbound marketing—we aren't trying to passively educate anyone outside our target market to get them interested. We're having enough trouble capturing the pre-qualified part of our funnel with in-person conversations. Converting people who haven't even fallen into the funnel yet? Who cares! They might get converted by accident if someone who already uses us takes the time to explain our product to them; but otherwise, the only time they'll hear about us is when we reach out to slowly warm them up for a million-dollar enterprise deal."
When the manager asks the engineering team about their thoughts on the product, the marketers are banking on the engineers to say anything above an "ehh, it could work I guess..." so the manager makes the purchase.
I'm assuming you are a developer / engineer with what follows, but you are likely not a decision maker with purchasing authority in the type of company they are targeting with these posts. I also don't think it's in Google's interests to market this in clear engineering speak because they are after consulting dollars as well.
Being an developer myself however, yeah it's difficult to to get at the technical substance of what any of this means, as there is certainly lots of vaporware out there <cough>... <watson>... <cough>..
I hadn't considered the consulting angle. Thinking on it now, if I were in their position, I would definitely sculpt my phrasing to dazzle and amaze and convince the reader that Google's already got it figured out so just hand 'em the reins.
I'm curious how exactly are people leveraging Istio for multicloud at the moment? Is this via an advanced Istio feature or some other Kubernetes-related project?
You can use Istio for this already, where one cluster is the master: https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/share... I've never tried across cloud providers, and so I don't know if latency would be a factor, but I think in theory it could work.
Anthos is a multi-cloud software delivery system, i.e. it ships Google Cloud softwares to everywhere including VMware and AWS. Istio is just its traffic/proxy layer across clouds.
Disclaimer: I work for Google as a senior developer advocate for Anthos.
If you are a hands-on dev (probably the majority of people here), even if you help feed information to the C-suite, I can definitely see how the article probably comes across as "marketing speak" for you.
However, I do want to note that having had the opportunity to sit in a number of customer meetings with very large enterprise customers and listen to our VP in conversations with their senior executive leadership, her article is intended to address concerns in a way that resonates with them. This article targets executive decision makers who need to commit enormous resources to long term strategies and it is important for them to hear in a language they understand that they will have enough flexibility to solve existing as well as evolving and shifting needs in the long run.
Many customers are trying to navigate their way to a successful modernization path that gives them the ability to run their workloads where they need to, helps them to apply modern best practices, and gives them unified management, monitoring, and compliance and auditing controls. Many of them are on prem and have VMware licenses right now, or have already begun implementing some kind of hybrid cloud strategy, or are even considering multi-cloud approaches.
For those of you looking for more practical information, we hear you. We were already preparing to launch new content directly targeted for developers to give you a direct, hands-on experience with Anthos using live clusters and a running application as part of Next.
Unfortunately due to changing conditions, we had to take a phased approach to communicating this as part of moving everything to completely digital formats. However, the good news is that you will be able to explore Anthos on Google Cloud for yourself and I'm really looking forward to sharing those details very soon.
I promised to share some news, so here it is. You can now try out for free. I'm pretty excited about this. The team worked hard to make sure you can spin up a deployment on Anthos with just a few clicks and explore it yourself. Details here: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/explore-anthos-w...
Every corp has one of these "fully-managed all-in-one just plug in your Java contractors" solutions.
Aimed at executives, these stacks run trivial applications at an extreme price, leaving DevOps folks to roll their eyes and ask for a transfer.
