Google rolled out a slew of updates for its Anthos cloud platform, debuting new capabilities designed to make it easier for customers to manage multi-cloud deployments.
The company launched Anthos in April 2019, and subsequently debuted a telco specific version of the platform, Anthos for Telecom, in March 2020.
Richard Seroter, director of outbound product management at Google Cloud, told Fierce the upgrades in its Anthos 1.7 release fall into two primary categories: those aimed at simplifying platform management and those designed to provide more consistency across different cloud environments.
In the first bucket are tools like Cloud Logging, which will now allow logs and metrics to be sent from Anthos deployments on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Google Cloud for processing. A new Connect gateway also falls into this category, allowing organizations to both pull from and push information to any Anthos compute cluster, whether it's running on AWS, bare metal in a telco location or on-premises.
RELATED: Google Cloud, AWS and Azure want to 'friend' telcos, but not every telco is ready to click 'accept'
Seroter explained traditional platforms are “getting denser and denser when they’re just kind of on-premise products, and when you can take advantage of having a cloud backend, you can kind of start to reverse that…I can offload certain operational tasks to the cloud.”
In the second group are updates designed to enable more consistency across cloud environments. These include the introduction of support for Windows containers and Google’s Container-Optimized OS, and the extension of its configuration management tool to cover more cluster types, including those running on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Red Hat platforms.
With these tools, “while I’m more distributed I’m not making my environment more complicated,” Seroter said.
In its 2021 State of the Cloud Report, software company Flexera noted 92% of enterprises reported having a multi-cloud strategy, while 82% said they had adopted a hybrid approach mingling public and private cloud assets. The data, based on a survey of 750 “global cloud decision-makers” conducted in October and November 2020, showed respondents used 2.6 public clouds on average.
RELATED: Google Cloud's revenue continues to grow, but losses mount
Seroter said there are lots of others trying to solve issues around multi-cloud management but argued they’re only tackling pieces of the problem.
“There’s some other cloud providers that are offering portions of what we do, maybe a control plane, maybe they’re shipping some of their components to other places,” he said. “But what’s kind of unique from a Google perspective is that we’re kind of treating multi-cloud and these hybrid scenarios a little more seriously.”
He concluded “the gist of a lot of this is we’re not necessarily trying to duplicate the public cloud…What we want to do is bring some of the major foundational capabilities to customers wherever they are…We just want to make it easier for customers to make their transition to the cloud. That’s the desired end state here.”