It allows you to manage a Kubernetes cluster from GCP that can have resurces mixed from both on-prem and google services (now you can also have pods on AWS).
For on-prem you'll need a WMWare hypervisor on your servers.
Why this is useful?
- Regulation: some workloads can be run only on-prem due to regulation (for instance, in Spain you can only process gambling data in the same region/comunidad autonoma you have the business).
- Cloud offloading of K8s workloads - you can workloads onprem off-peak and mixed loads cloud+onprem on peak times.
- Google Cloud Marketplace : you can deploy solutions from GCP Marketlplace on Anthos (that is, on your hardware, now also on other clouds).
- (now) Onprem + Multicloud workloads: Multicloud is hard. Not just having to know well how stuff works on each cloud, but also having to deal with rough interactions between clouds (even with k8s).
The deal breaker for my for me is the VMware component. That licensing is too costly and a silly move imo as if they could do this without that hypervisor and use something free like Xen or KVM they’d have a ton more adoption.
Google plans to have Anthos on bare metal by year's end.
For me that's one of the biggest adoption barriers because unless you already have that VMware licences, you'll have to burn a lot of CapEX to run Anthos.
I hope they don't make us pay for both the bare metal license and the by-cpu license (or it is a _very_ small amount).
It allows you to manage a Kubernetes cluster from GCP that can have resurces mixed from both on-prem and google services (now you can also have pods on AWS).
For on-prem you'll need a WMWare hypervisor on your servers.
Why this is useful?
- Regulation: some workloads can be run only on-prem due to regulation (for instance, in Spain you can only process gambling data in the same region/comunidad autonoma you have the business).
- Cloud offloading of K8s workloads - you can workloads onprem off-peak and mixed loads cloud+onprem on peak times.
- Google Cloud Marketplace : you can deploy solutions from GCP Marketlplace on Anthos (that is, on your hardware, now also on other clouds).
- (now) Onprem + Multicloud workloads: Multicloud is hard. Not just having to know well how stuff works on each cloud, but also having to deal with rough interactions between clouds (even with k8s).
Disclaimer: I work for a Google cloud partner.