Summary of Google's Anthos

Janakiram MSV has a nice post on Forbes explaining Google’s Anthos. Janakarim starts off with a description of the current state which I totally agree with.

Despite the extensive coverage at Google Cloud Next and, of course, the general availability, the Anthos announcement was confusing. The documentation is sparse, and the service is not fully integrated with the self-service console. Except for the hybrid connectivity and multi-cloud application deployment, not much is known about this new technology from Google.

What is Google’s strategy?

The core theme of Anthos is application modernization. Google envisages a future where all enterprise applications will run on Kubernetes. 

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With Anthos, Google wants all your contemporary microservices-based applications (greenfield) in Kubernetes while migrating existing VMs (brownfield) to containers. Applications running in non-x86 architecture and legacy apps will continue to run either in physical or virtual machines.

How does Google Anthos relate to AWS and Azure?

Anthos is a bold move from Google. It is taking a calculated risk in moving away from the clichéd hybrid cloud narrative that its competitors are using to lure enterprises. Anthos is bound to be compared with Microsoft Azure Stack and AWS hybrid story consisting of VMware and Outposts. The fundamental difference between Google and the rest lies in the technology foundation strongly rooted in containers and Kubernetes.

Janakiram did a nice job of putting into one post that can be so hard to figure out what Anthos is.

Heading to Google Cloud Next '19, Apr 9-10

Google’s Cloud event is on Apr 9-11 in SF at Moscone Center. Cloud infrastructure is the industry standard. 5G architects realized in order to scale support micro services they need a cloud native design. AWS is famous for the Cloud. But in many ways Google started with Cloud ideas before AWS. The challenge is Google is more of a technical company than a Amazon and they don’t talk about the Cloud in the way as AWS.

This is my first Google Cloud event. I have track and watched from afar, and thanks to some friends I am attending Google Cloud for the first time. I don’t plan on live blogging.

One of my friends though wanted me to share my impression of Google’s communication strategy and how well that works. That is complicated to articulate, and I’ll give it a shot though to share some observations.

Here are some of the tracks.

Oracle Cloud is aggressively hiring

I have lived in Seattle, well actually Redmond for 25 years and I have no plans on moving. I was given an offer by Microsoft to leave Apple in 1992 and I said to myself, "something is going on in Redmond and the only way I am going to find out is to move there. If I don't like it I'll leave."

With Microsoft's strength in software it supported an ecosystem that made it easy for Amazon to create Amazon Web Services, hiring some top Microsoft people while importing many others. Now the Seattle area is a Cloud Hub with Google, Salesforce, and so many others.

What is a little known fact is Oracle is hiring aggressively for its cloud group and I know so many ex-Microsoft people who now work for Oracle. Bet you they never thought when they left Microsoft they would eventually end up at Oracle.

Here is the press release that says Oracle is hiring 5,000 people in the US for its cloud group.

“This year, Oracle is hiring more than five-thousand new engineers, consultants, sales and support people into its rapidly growing cloud business. This injection of talent will help Oracle sustain the momentum in what is already the world’s fastest growing multi-billion dollar cloud business.”

I need to have lunch with some of friends who are now at Oracle. I used to have lunch with friends who were at AWS when they first made the move.

We'll see how quickly Oracle expands its Cloud footprint.

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Cruise Ships Data Centers, 9 months of planning, testing, and installing

Data Center Knowledge has a post on a cruise ships data center. Reading the post it is a classic active-active design with locations is stern and bow. The IT company has installed the system in 6 ships.

“Heider’s team deployed DataCore’s SAN virtualization software to simplify storage management and ensure high availability. The software synchronously mirrors data across two data centers on each ship, so if one of them fails, the other takes over automatically. “It’s really good software and easy to use,” he said.

BSH spent the last four to five years upgrading and installing the data center infrastructure in TUI cruise ships. It takes about nine months to plan, test, and install the technology on each vessel, Heider said.”

What was an interesting fact is there are 9 months allowed for planning, testing, and installing.

What comes to mind is the huge opportunity to apply cloud methods. the below image is from a DCD webinar.

Google Tours Its Data Centers as part of the Cloud Battle

Google's Joe Kava presented at its Cloud Event.  Go to the 5 min mark in the below video.

Open a Chrome or Firefox browser and you can take this DC 360 degree tour.

Wouldn't it be great if Amazon and Microsoft responded in a similar way?

If you don't like watching videos there are a few news articles that report on the above.


Google finally told its most important cloud customers what they wanted to hear
Business Insider - ‎Mar 24, 2016‎
In fact, Kava claims that Google is the "world's largest private investor in renewable energy," with $2 billion given to wind and solar companies, as it tries to reduce its power consumption as much as it can. That's a cost savings that gets passed on ...

Google Cloud Platform's 3 keys to the roadmap: Data center, security, containers
TechRepublic - ‎22 hours ago‎
Joe Kava, one of the heads of Google's data center efforts, was the speaker who explained the company's strategy in the data center. Early on, there was a big push in the concept of "your data centers are Google's data centers," likely to position the ...
Google Cloud Platform touts investments in security, data centers, and containers


ZDNet - ‎Mar 24, 2016‎
DeMichillie then introduced data center head Joe Kava, who walked through Google's data center strategy. According to Kava, the core principles of Google's approach to data centers are availability, security, and performance. Kava explained the company ...