Google Cloud Unleashes Managed Service Mesh, Serverless For Anthos

‘Anthos quickly rose in popularity as a core service offering for enterprises who want to adopt cloud at their own pace,’ says Arseny Gorokh, head of Google competency for EPAM Systems. ‘As one of the earliest adopters of Anthos and one of a few Services Partners for Anthos, we’ve seen how these exciting new features can further reduce the complexities of managing microservices-based applications for our customers and allow developers to efficiently adopt modern frameworks.’

Google Cloud has added new managed service mesh and serverless capabilities for Anthos, its hybrid and multi-cloud platform introduced in April.

Anthos Service Mesh connects, manages and secures microservices when using Anthos, which lets customers run their applications on-premises or in the public cloud, including rivals Amazon Web Services’ and Microsoft Azure’s clouds in addition to Google Cloud. Cloud Run for Anthos allows customers to run stateless workloads on a fully managed Anthos environment.

Both are in the beta launch phase, which means they’re ready for broader customer testing and use, but they haven’t reached general availability that’s open to all customers and aren’t covered by Google Cloud service-level agreements.

Google Cloud also announced Binary Authorization for Anthos, which helps ensure only validated, verified images are integrated into customers’ managed build-and-release process, and said Anthos Config Management now includes capabilities to help automate and enforce organization-specific policies.

The Anthos announcement continues to “help make the lives of developers and of our clients easier through greater abstraction – promoting software-enabled and centralized configuration, greater visibility to app ops, and automating policy and security at scale” regardless of whether it’s on-premise or in the cloud, said Tim O’Connor, a principal at Deloitte Consulting, an Anthos systems integrator launch partner and now one of 40-plus Anthos hardware, software and services partners.

“Google is continuing to deliver cloud-native/open source-enabled capabilities to our clients, helping them to modernize in place and at their own pace,” O’Connor said. “Powerful stuff.”

Anthos quickly rose in popularity as a core service offering for enterprises that want to adopt cloud at their own pace, according to Arseny Gorokh, head of Google competency for Newtown, Pa.-based EPAM Systems, a digital platform engineering and software development services provider.

“EPAM is working with our enterprise customers to leverage Anthos in their hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud approaches to modernization,” Gorokh said. “As one of the earliest adopters of Anthos and one of a few services partners for Anthos, we’ve seen how these exciting new features can further reduce the complexities of managing microservices-based applications for our customers and allow developers to efficiently adopt modern frameworks.”

Anthos Service Mesh

Anthos Service Mesh recognizes that many organizations view microservices architectures as essential in modernizing their applications, but moving from monolithic applications to large numbers of microservices increases operational complexity, according to Jennifer Lin, Google Cloud’s director of product management, and Pali Bhat, vice president of product and design.

“To address this, you can use a service mesh -- an abstraction layer that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, monitor and manage microservices,” Lin and Bhat wrote in a Google Cloud blog post today. “As a managed offering, Anthos Service Mesh in Beta makes it easy to add this abstraction layer to your environment. Built on Istio open APIs (application programming interfaces), it lets you easily manage and secure inter-service traffic with a unified administrative interface and provides uniform traffic controls that span them both. Anthos Service Mesh gives you deep visibility into your application traffic, thereby improving your development experience and making it easier to troubleshoot these complex environments.”

Cloud Run For Anthos

Cloud Run for Anthos allows customers to run stateless containers on Google Cloud or on-premises with the same consistent experience. It’s built on Knative, a Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy and manage serverless workloads.

“Cloud Run for Anthos enables you to be more agile by letting you write code like you always do, without having to learn advanced Kubernetes concepts,” Lin and Bhat’s blog post said. “It enforces best practices and provides deep integration with Anthos by offering advanced networking support and enabling cloud accelerators, which means your workloads can all run in the same cluster.”

Cloud Run on Anthos will make workload migration between different environments and platforms even easier by making the auto-scaling of stateless containers more efficient, according to EPAM Systems’ Gorokh.

“It will remove impediments of languages, libraries and other code restrictions, making it possible to go from container to production in seconds,” Gorokh said. “This will significantly decrease efforts in deploying, supporting and developing applications that become increasingly more complex in demanding business environments.”

The addition of Cloud Run to Anthos is “a welcome boon to the ease of use of this platform for modern cloud-native developers and a strong signal to business buyers that Google is continuing to invest by bringing the best of Google Cloud down out of the clouds and into the hands of enterprises,” according to Miles Ward, chief technology officer at SADA Systems, a North Hollywood, Calif., cloud technology consulting services company and Google Premier Partner.

“Assuming Google can keep up the pace, they will be the ones to beat in the race for the intercloud platform,” Ward said.

Binary Authorization And Anthos Config Management

Binary Authorization helps customers build defined security checks into their development process earlier, making sure only trusted workloads are deployed into their environments.

“By ensuring workloads are assessed and validated before they are deployed, enterprises can have the confidence that these workloads can be trusted,” Lin and Bhat said.

Meanwhile, Anthos Config Management’s new Policy Controller and Config Connector features allow customers to enforce consistent security policies and controls continuously across Google Cloud, on-prem environments and other clouds.