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Episode 2: Google Anthos : What is Google Anthos, Architecture and its key components

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What is Anthos by Google Cloud ? Anthos is a modern application management platform that provides a consistent development and operations experience for cloud and on-prem environments. In this video we talk about the need for Google Anthos, what business problems it tries to solve, deep dive into the architecture and its key components. We would cover Anthos Service Mesh, Anthos Config Management, Anthos GKE on VMWare, Anthos cluster on Bare metal, Anthos CI/CD development and devOps tools, Cloud-native and unified process for cloud deployment.

The key components of Anthos Architecture - Infra, Container and Cluster Management : Google provides the managed Kubernetes distribution (GKE) for container orchestration and management, handling upgrades and provides enterprise grade capabilities like workload security, pod autoscaling, audit logging etc.
Anthos platform also leverages the same managed Kubernetes distribution (GKE) for on-prem and multi-cloud deployment. With Anthos, you get a reliable, standardized and secured way to run your workloads on Kubernetes clusters on any environment. You can also enforce and monitor policies on your GKE clusters across environments in a unified way.
Anthos is supported on on-premises through VMware VSphere or through bare metal installation. On Multi-Cloud, AWS is supported, with Azure support currently in preview.

Service Management One of the architecture pattern for breaking down a large monolithic application is a collection of loosely coupled fine-grained services (microservices) and packaging them as independent deployable units using containers and exposing the functionality through APIs. All communications between the services happens through the APIs.

With the microservices architecture pattern implemented, there are various cross cutting concerns that needs to be implemented, such as secure communication between services, collecting telemetry data, logging and monitoring, api throttling, traffic management, version management etc. These various functions can be decoupled from the actual application by employing a technology called Service Mesh. Service Mesh basically adds a sidecar proxy to your containers which intercepts all the request and adds the required functionality in a unified way. Open source tool like Istio provides these capabilities uniformly across a network of services.

Anthos provides Anthos Service Mesh, which is managed offering that leverage Istio and provides various other enterprise capabilities, operation agility and management of services across the Anthos environments.

Anthos Config Management (ACM) One of the common challenges faced by enterprises is how to ensure deployment configurations are always consistent with the required desired state across environments (hybrid and multicloud) and can be audited and monitored whenever required. That’s where Anthos Config Management comes into play which allows to define configurations, policies and custom rules in a centralized place, which is applied and enforced to all the required GKE clusters to provide the required desired state.

Anthos Config Management provides a set of components that ensures any changes from the Git repository is applied to all the clusters and validated from time to time. These components needs to be installed on all the required GKE clusters.

ACM Repository configuration One of the important consideration is how to structure your configurations that need to be applied to your clusters. The Config Sync component requires the structure for the configuration in the Git repository in a certain directory structure. Refer to video section of ACM Repository configuration for more details

Application Development and Deployment For developing applications on Anthos, Google Cloud offers various integrated toolset that simplifies development, integration and deployment. For instance, Google Cloud Code lets you write, run and debug your cloud native application and provides a set of predefined templates that helps deploying applications quickly. Cloud Build lets you create a standardized build workflow to generate container images which can be triggered from your source control repository.

Cloud Build also integrates with Anthos Config Management at build time to ensure any new deployment artifacts (Kubernetes objects etc) are validated well in advance against existing policies. Once changes are validated, deployment changes are propagated to production environment. These set of tools and seamless integration with the required products ensures continuous integration and continuous deployment processes can be easily adopted for building secure and compliant Anthos applications.

Google Anthos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMIv_bw9taQ&list=PL42TJmsjarLcV_dSupNmgzNZbAnlJnww_

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