Google Broadens Scope Of Anthos Hybrid Cloud Management Platform

Google on Monday updated its Anthos hybrid cloud management platform to add more features for microservices and managing “serverless” workloads.

The platform was announced in April at Google Next, with Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian billing it as a digital transformation platform for enterprises, particularly those looking to manage both remote and on-premises cloud infrastructure.

The new features include Services Mesh for managing microservices and Cloud Run, which enables fully managed serverless workloads.

Since breaking applications up into microservices can greatly increase complexity, Services Mesh introduces advanced management for microservices environments via an abstraction layer that provides a common way to connect, secure, monitor and manage services.

Services Mesh

It is built on Istio application programming interfaces and provides an administrator dashboard for tracking communications traffic amongst microservices.

Cloud Run allows apps to run in a serverless environment, meaning those writing the code don’t have to be aware of what infrastructure is used, the server infrastructure being dynamically managed by a cloud provider.

The feature is based on the Knative open application programming interface and runtime environment for services running on Kubernetes.

Programmers have no need to know advanced Kubernetes concepts, with Cloud Run tuning the code to run on serverless environments and handling inter-application communication and security, Google said.

Cloud Run

Cloud Run enforces best practices, provides access to custom machine types, offers advanced networking support and enables cloud accelerators.

This enables workloads to all run in the same cluster, speeding up communication and reducing the complexity of management tasks.

Google said Cloud Run allows apps to run in the cloud and on-premises with consistent results.

The company also announced a development-centric security system called Binary Authorisation adn a policy control and configuration connector called Config Management.