We see a shift from accidental hybrid or whole-of-estate cloud migration plans to intentional and sophisticated hybrid, poly or portable cloud strategies, where organizations apply multidimensional principles to establish and execute their cloud strategy: where to host their various data and functional assets based on risk, ability to control and performance profiles; how to utilize their on-premise infrastructure investments while reducing the cost of operations; and how to take advantage of multiple cloud providers and their unique differentiated services without creating complexity and friction for users building and operating applications.
Anthos is Google's answer to enable hybrid and multicloud strategies by providing a high-level management and control plane on top of a set of open source technologies such as GKE, Service Mesh and a Git-based Configuration Management. It enables running portable workloads and other assets on different hosting environments, including Google Cloud and on-premises hardware. Although other cloud providers have comparative offerings, Anthos intends to go beyond a hybrid cloud to a portable cloud enabler using open source components, but that is yet to be seen. We're seeing a rising interest in Anthos. While Google's approach in managed hybrid cloud environments seems promising, it’s not a magic bullet and requires changes in both existing cloud and on-premise assets. Our advice for clients considering Anthos is to make measured tradeoffs between selecting services from the Google Cloud ecosystem and other options, to maintain their right level of neutrality and control.
