Becoming Cloud Agnostic with Anthos

CIOs & IT Directors/Managers have to make difficult decisions on almost a daily basis.  Those decisions can often come with significant technical and business risks. 

A common decision facing them today is the selection of a cloud platform for their next application and project.  There are both technical and business risks associated with choosing a cloud provider or choosing to deploy an on-premise solution which leaves them many questions to ask themselves while making their selection:

• What if my cloud provider has an outage or a security breach?- What if my cloud provider raises rates which directly impacts the profitability of my cloud application or solution?

• What if a different cloud provider from the one I am chosen introduces new rates that are significantly lower than what I am paying for my provider?

• What if I deploy on-premise, but I can’t scale fast enough to keep up with demand?

• What if I have a business downturn and I can no longer afford a cloud solution for my application?

• What if my cloud provider doesn’t keep up with the latest technology and they don’t offer something I need in the future?

• What if my cloud provider doesn’t have wide enough geographic coverage for my application as it expands its own reach?

• What if I have to change providers in the future, how much retro-fitting will be needed and how much re-development will have to be done to move to a different platform?

• Are the business risks involved worth being tied to any one provider?

Recent years have seen containerization technology allow companies to become physical platform and network agnostic, but what if there were a way to become cloud agnostic as well to minimize all of these risks?  Google Anthos was designed to do just that.   Anthos utilizes the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) along with an Istio-powered service mesh to allow you to run Kubernetes clusters on-premise or on any cloud provider.   Your Kubernetes clusters can even run simultaneously meshed across multiple providers.   

Being cloud agnostic puts some control back in the CIO or IT Director/Managers hands.   They now have leverage when negotiating cloud services contract renewals (they can move their traffic to where they get the based rates) and may even be able to move traffic based on any time-of-use rates or geographic rates that cloud providers introduce in the future.  This will help them maximize efficiency and keep costs as low as possible.  They are also protected against any service outage from any one cloud provider and can easily move traffic if an individual provider has a major security breach.

Anthos also gives companies another option when they have chosen to move away from their existing cloud provider.  Instead of retrofitting to one specific new provider, they can choose to put that development time towards become cloud agnostic, even if they move to one specific new provider.  This will then help make any future transitions easier or in many cases seamless.  

There are many pros and cons to consider when making decisions like these.  Anthos brings, at a minimum, another option to consider.