When Google announced Anthos at Google Cloud Next, it was framing the product as a direct response to a problem most large enterprises already live with: workloads spread across on-premises infrastructure and multiple public clouds, with no consistent way to manage them. This article explains what Anthos is, what its core components do, and how it compares to hybrid cloud offerings from AWS and Microsoft Azure.
What Is Google Cloud Anthos?
Anthos is a managed application platform from Google that enables organizations to run workloads across on-premises environments, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and other public clouds — including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure — using a consistent set of tools and APIs. It is built on top of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and is grounded in open-source technologies such as Kubernetes and Istio.
The platform evolved from Google’s earlier Cloud Services Platform and reflects Google’s position that hybrid and multi-cloud is not an edge case but the default state for enterprise IT. Anthos is designed to let developers build an application once and run it anywhere across their multi-cloud footprint — a modern take on the classic “write once, run anywhere” philosophy.
Why Multi-Cloud Matters to Enterprises
Enterprises rarely operate on a single cloud provider. Acquisitions, departmental preferences, regulatory requirements, and latency considerations all push organizations toward using multiple clouds alongside existing on-premises infrastructure. The challenge is operational: each cloud provider has its own APIs, tooling, security models, and deployment workflows.
Anthos addresses this by providing a control plane that sits above individual cloud providers. Instead of learning and managing separate toolchains for each environment, teams use a unified set of Kubernetes-based tools to deploy and operate workloads regardless of where they run.
Core Components of Anthos
GKE On-Prem
GKE On-Prem brings the managed Kubernetes experience of Google Kubernetes Engine into a customer’s own data center. It runs on existing hardware and automatically receives feature updates and security patches from Google, reducing the operational burden of maintaining a Kubernetes cluster on-premises.
Anthos Config Management
Anthos Config Management provides centralized policy and configuration control across all Kubernetes clusters in an Anthos environment, whether they are running on-premises or in a cloud. Key capabilities include:
- Multi-cluster policy enforcement: Define role-based access controls (RBAC), resource quotas, and namespace configurations once and apply them across all clusters.
- GitOps-style configuration: Policies are stored in a source repository, and a built-in validator reviews every configuration change before it is committed, reducing misconfigurations before they reach production.
- Active monitoring: The platform continuously monitors cluster state against declared policies and can flag or remediate drift.
- Istio integration: Config Management works alongside Istio, Google’s open-source service mesh, to apply and enforce network-level policies for microservices.
Anthos Service Mesh
Anthos Service Mesh is built on Istio APIs and is designed to connect, secure, monitor, and manage microservices running in containerized environments. It provides a single administrative dashboard for tracking application traffic across the mesh, which reduces the complexity of debugging and operating distributed services in a multi-cloud context.
Cloud Run for Anthos
Cloud Run for Anthos brings serverless computing capabilities to the Anthos platform. It allows teams to run stateless workloads on a managed Anthos environment without directly managing the underlying cloud infrastructure. Billing is consumption-based — resources are only charged when the application is actively handling requests. At the time of the original announcement, Cloud Run for Anthos was available for workloads running on GCP and on-premises environments.
Migrate for Anthos
Migrate for Anthos automates the process of moving virtual machines (VMs) — whether running on-premises or in the cloud — directly into containers on GKE. Rather than a manual lift-and-shift or a full application rewrite, Migrate for Anthos extracts the workload from the VM image and converts it into a container format. This is intended to lower both the technical barrier and the skill requirements for teams modernizing legacy workloads.
Open-Source Foundation and Vendor Lock-In Avoidance
A central design decision in Anthos is reliance on open-source standards. Kubernetes and Istio are both vendor-neutral CNCF projects, which means workloads built and managed through Anthos are not tied to proprietary Google APIs. This is a deliberate strategy to reduce the risk of vendor lock-in — a concern that pushes many enterprises away from committing fully to any single cloud provider.
Because Anthos is delivered as a software platform rather than as proprietary hardware, it can run on existing on-premises hardware investments, lowering the cost of adoption for organizations that are not yet ready to decommission their data centers.
How Anthos Compares to AWS Outposts and Azure Stack
Both AWS and Microsoft Azure offer their own hybrid cloud products, but with a different scope than Anthos.
AWS Outposts
AWS Outposts delivers native AWS infrastructure and services — using the same AWS APIs, tools, and management interfaces — into a customer’s on-premises data center or colocation facility. The result is a consistent AWS experience across on-premises and the AWS cloud. However, Outposts is scoped to the AWS ecosystem; it does not provide management capabilities for workloads running on GCP or Azure.
Azure Stack
Azure Stack extends Azure services and APIs into on-premises environments, giving teams a consistent development and operational model across on-premises and Azure cloud. Like Outposts, it is scoped to the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and does not manage workloads on competing cloud providers.
The Key Differentiator
The primary architectural distinction is scope. AWS Outposts and Azure Stack are hybrid cloud solutions — they connect on-premises infrastructure to a single cloud provider. Anthos is a multi-cloud management platform — it is designed to manage workloads across on-premises infrastructure, GCP, AWS, and Azure from a single control plane.
| Feature | Google Anthos | AWS Outposts | Azure Stack |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-premises support | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Native cloud integration | GCP | AWS | Azure |
| Third-party cloud management | Yes (AWS, Azure) | No | No |
| Open-source foundation | Kubernetes, Istio | Proprietary AWS APIs | Proprietary Azure APIs |
| Serverless option | Cloud Run for Anthos | AWS Lambda (cloud only at launch) | Azure Functions (cloud only at launch) |
Who Should Consider Anthos?
Anthos is most relevant to organizations that:
- Already operate workloads across two or more cloud providers and want unified visibility and policy control.
- Are running significant on-premises infrastructure they cannot immediately migrate to public cloud, but want consistent tooling with their cloud environments.
- Have Kubernetes expertise or are investing in building it, and want to avoid learning provider-specific orchestration tooling for each cloud.
- Are modernizing legacy VM-based workloads and want a lower-friction path to containers than a full rewrite.
- Have strong concerns about vendor lock-in and want a management layer built on open-source standards.
Summary
Google Cloud Anthos is an opinionated but open-standards-based answer to multi-cloud complexity. Its components — GKE On-Prem, Anthos Config Management, Anthos Service Mesh, Cloud Run for Anthos, and Migrate for Anthos — address different aspects of the problem: running Kubernetes consistently on any infrastructure, enforcing policy at scale, managing microservice traffic, enabling serverless workloads, and accelerating VM-to-container migrations. Its most distinctive characteristic compared to competing offerings from AWS and Azure is its explicit support for managing workloads across multiple cloud providers, not just bridging on-premises environments to a single vendor’s cloud.