Google has been steadily expanding Anthos, its Kubernetes-centred hybrid cloud platform, with additions including Anthos Service Mesh and Cloud Run for Anthos. To understand why these additions matter — and why Google is investing so heavily in this direction — it helps to understand what Anthos actually is and how it fits into Google’s broader cloud strategy.
What Is Google Anthos?
Anthos is best understood as a brand and a product layer rather than a single technology. At its core, it is Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) deployed in a certified configuration that can run on-premises hardware — via partners such as Dell and HPE — while maintaining a managed connection back to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
An agent installed on the on-premises cluster maintains an encrypted connection to GCP. This allows operators to manage workloads, deploy applications, and scale services from the GCP console, regardless of whether those workloads run in a Google data centre or in their own. Reliable connectivity to GCP — for example via Google Cloud Interconnect — is a practical requirement for the management plane to function properly.
Anthos was first announced at Google Cloud Next in April 2019.
Why Kubernetes Is Central to Google’s Cloud Strategy
Kubernetes was originally developed at Google before being open-sourced and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Google’s long-term bet is that Kubernetes will become the dominant infrastructure abstraction layer — the standard API through which applications are deployed and managed — in the same way that virtual machines (VMs) became the default in the previous era of infrastructure.
This gives Google a strategic advantage over AWS and Microsoft Azure, both of which lead Google Cloud in overall market share. AWS and Azure both offer managed Kubernetes services (EKS and AKS respectively), but Kubernetes is peripheral to their core identity. For Google, Kubernetes — and Anthos built on top of it — is the centrepiece of its enterprise cloud push.
How Anthos Compares to Microsoft Azure Stack
The closest Microsoft equivalent is Azure Stack, which allows organisations to run a subset of Azure services in their own data centres. However, the two products take fundamentally different approaches:
- Azure Stack is a curated bundle of Azure services — including VMs, SQL databases, Azure Functions, and web application hosting — brought on-premises as a cohesive package of specific service types.
- Anthos is more of a blank container runtime canvas. Any application that can run in a container can run on Anthos, including applications sourced from the GCP Marketplace. The platform imposes fewer constraints on what you deploy.
A rough analogy: Anthos is similar to Azure Stack with only Azure Service Fabric — Microsoft’s own microservices and container orchestration platform — installed, rather than the full suite of higher-level services. The key difference is that Kubernetes has become an industry-wide standard, while Azure Service Fabric remains largely a Microsoft-internal technology.
Both products share a common goal: making the experience of managing application workloads on-premises as consistent as possible with managing them in the public cloud.
Handling Legacy Workloads
One practical barrier to Kubernetes adoption is the large installed base of VM-based workloads that organisations cannot easily rewrite as containers. Anthos addresses this through:
- VM-in-container support: Anthos can run VMs inside containers on Kubernetes, allowing legacy workloads to coexist on the same platform.
- Migrate for Anthos: A service designed to migrate existing VMware or Google Compute Engine VMs into containerised workloads running on Anthos, reducing the need for manual application refactoring.
Anthos Service Mesh and Cloud Run for Anthos
Two capabilities that have been added to the Anthos platform — Anthos Service Mesh and Cloud Run for Anthos — are worth understanding in context of the open-source ecosystem:
Anthos Service Mesh
Anthos Service Mesh is built on Istio, the open-source service mesh project. Istio handles traffic management, mutual TLS authentication, observability, and policy enforcement between services in a Kubernetes cluster. Anthos Service Mesh packages Istio with a managed control plane, GCP console integration, and pre-configured telemetry, reducing the operational complexity of running Istio at production scale.
Cloud Run for Anthos
Cloud Run for Anthos is based on Knative, the open-source project that adds event-driven, serverless-style workload execution on top of Kubernetes. Cloud Run for Anthos allows teams to deploy containerised applications without managing the underlying Kubernetes primitives directly, using a simplified push-to-deploy model similar to platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The managed version wraps Knative with GCP tooling and support.
In both cases, Google’s contribution is not new underlying technology, but productisation: managed configurations, integrated consoles, and support contracts that make open-source projects more accessible to enterprise teams that lack the operational expertise to run them independently.
The Bigger Picture: Google’s Enterprise Cloud Strategy
Anthos is Google’s primary vehicle for building enterprise cloud relationships. By embedding GKE deeply into on-premises infrastructure and offering a consistent management layer, Google aims to make GCP the natural management hub even for organisations that cannot or will not move all workloads to the public cloud.
The strategic logic is straightforward: if Kubernetes becomes the standard API for infrastructure — as VMs were before it — then Google’s early and deep investment in Kubernetes gives it a durable competitive position. Anthos is the product through which Google intends to convert that technical heritage into enterprise market share.
Whether that strategy succeeds depends on how well Google can support enterprise customers and build an ecosystem around Anthos — areas where AWS and Azure currently have a significant lead.
This article is based on reporting originally published by The Register in September 2019.