Google Cloud Expands Anthos to AWS: Multi-Cloud Application Management Now Generally Available

This article is based on a Google Cloud announcement originally covered by Analytics India Magazine in May 2020.

What Is Anthos?

Anthos is Google Cloud’s managed application platform designed for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It gives enterprises a single, consistent control plane to build, deploy, and operate applications — whether those workloads run on Google Cloud, in an on-premises data centre, or on a third-party cloud provider such as AWS or Azure.

The platform is built on Kubernetes and integrates tooling for service mesh networking, policy management, configuration management, and workload migration. The core promise of Anthos is that teams should be able to apply the same operational practices across every environment without re-architecting their applications for each deployment target.

Anthos Multi-Cloud Support Reaches General Availability

With this release (announced May 2020), Google Cloud moved Anthos multi-cloud support from preview to General Availability (GA). The GA release started with AWS, consolidating operations across on-premises environments, Google Cloud, and AWS under a single management layer. Support for Microsoft Azure was available in preview at the time of the announcement.

The practical impact for platform and DevOps teams includes:

• Unified operations: A common management interface covers workloads regardless of where they run, reducing the operational overhead of context-switching between provider-specific toolchains.
• Consistent security posture: Policies can be defined once and enforced consistently across every cluster, whether it is on-premises or in a public cloud.
• Protection of existing investment: Organisations can continue using infrastructure they have already provisioned on AWS or on-premises without being required to migrate everything to Google Cloud.

Key Feature Expansions

Policy and Configuration Management for VMs

Anthos Config Management was extended to support virtual machines on Google Cloud, bringing the same declarative, GitOps-style configuration approach that was already available for containers. By expressing VM policies as code, teams can:

• Reduce configuration drift caused by manual changes.
• Enforce a desired state continuously across heterogeneous workloads.
• Accelerate delivery by removing manual approval steps for routine policy updates.

Anthos Service Mesh Support for Virtual Machines

Anthos Service Mesh was announced to gain support for workloads running in virtual machines via a sidecar proxy model. The sidecar acts as a network gateway, making VM-based services visible to and manageable by the mesh alongside container workloads. This allows teams to:

• Apply consistent traffic management, observability, and security policies across containers and VMs.
• Incrementally modernise legacy VM workloads without a big-bang migration to containers.
• Maintain service networking consistency across Google Cloud, on-premises, and other clouds.

Note: At the time of the announcement, VM support for Anthos Service Mesh was described as coming in the following months, not yet GA.

Running Anthos Without a Third-Party Hypervisor

Google Cloud announced that, beginning later in 2020, customers would be able to run Anthos on-premises without requiring a third-party hypervisor. This was intended to reduce licensing costs and remove the operational complexity of managing an additional vendor relationship for the underlying virtualisation layer.

Migrate for Anthos Improvements

The release also included updates to Migrate for Anthos, Google Cloud’s tooling for lifting and shifting VM workloads into containers. The updated release focused on simplifying day-two operations — the ongoing management tasks after an initial migration — and improving integration between migrated workloads and the broader Anthos service ecosystem. The goal is to lower migration costs and improve performance without requiring manual re-architecting.

Why Multi-Cloud Management Matters for DevOps Teams

Most large enterprises already operate workloads across multiple environments by necessity — legacy on-premises systems, cloud migrations underway, and SaaS dependencies create heterogeneous infrastructure by default. The operational challenge is not choosing a single cloud but managing complexity when workloads are spread across environments with different APIs, security models, and toolchains.

Anthos addresses this by abstracting the infrastructure layer. Teams interact with Kubernetes-native APIs and Anthos tooling regardless of the underlying environment, which means:

• Platform teams can enforce consistent security and compliance policies without writing provider-specific automation for each environment.
• Application teams can deploy to any target environment using the same CI/CD pipelines and manifests.
• Organisations retain the ability to move workloads between environments as cost, compliance, or latency requirements change — without vendor lock-in to a single provider’s proprietary services.

Summary of the Anthos May 2020 Expansion

Further Reading

For the latest Anthos documentation, feature status, and release notes, refer to the official Google Cloud Anthos page. Feature availability and product names may have changed since this announcement.