Anthos is an open hybrid and multi-cloud application platform that provides a consistent development and operations experience for cloud and on-premises environments. This article assumes you are familiar with Kubernetes Managed services.
Let’s look at the some of the key components of Anthos –
Anthos Dashboard – Is a central dashboard to manage your anthos environment. The dashboard currently comprises of clusters and service mash. In future, it would be good to have any actionable monitoring alerts displayed on the dashboard.
The cool thing is that it provides a single interface to manage KBE clusters, across environments (on-prem or from multiple cloud providers like AWS). In a future article, I will go through a sample application running on a multi cloud environment.
Following image shows the cluster dashboard and properties associated with the cluster (cluster size, core details etc).
The service mesh dashboard list down the services (micro services) associated with each clusters and service level parameters ( request, latency etc).
The topology view of the service mesh provides a graphical representation of dependencies between the services.
The next feature (which was first available through cloud logging dashboard) allows you to define and monitor service level options. Using this feature, you can define the required service level parameters( latency, availability etc) and thresholds for your services and generate alerts to take corrective action. For instance, login service should be available 99% of the time.
Following figure shows the Service level indicator not being met for the defined goal. You can test your service level options through the interface.
Anthos, through service mesh (you need to enable or include service mesh/istio in your cluster) logs all the telemetry options for your service, so these features are available out of the box. This is a handy feature, where you can define and track all service level agreements and compliance in one place.
Anthos, in my view is a real game changer technology for managing hybrid and multi cloud applications across environments. With more support planned for Edge deployment (bare metal deployments) , workloads can be managed on the edge and visualised through a central dashboard.
In the next article, we would go through the key components on Anthos in detail.
