At the heart of Anthos is the most popular open source project of our times

– Kubernetes. Anthos is built on the firm foundation of Google Kubernetes

Engine (GKE), the managed containers as a service offering on Google
Cloud Platform. But other vital technologies augment the power of
Kubernetes.

Let’s take a closer look at the core building blocks of Anthos:

1) Google Kubernetes Engine – This is the central command and control

center of Anthos. Customers use the GKE control plane to manage the
distributed infrastructure running in Google's cloud, on-premise data
center and other cloud platforms.

2) GKE On-prem – Google is delivering a Kubernetes-based software

platform that’s consistent with GKE. Customers can deploy this on any
compatible hardware and Google will manage the platform. From
upgrading the version of Kubernetes to applying the latest patches, Google
will treat it as a logical extension of GKE. It’s important to note that GKE
On-prem runs as a virtual appliance on top of VMware vSphere 6.5. The
support for other hypervisors such as Hyper-V and KVM is in works.

3) Istio – This technology enables federated network management across

the platform. Istio acts as the service mesh connecting various components
of applications deployed across the data center, GCP, and other clouds. It
seamlessly integrates with software-defined networks such as VMware
NSX, Cisco ACI, and of course Google's own Andromeda. Customers with
existing investments in network appliances such as F5 can integrate Istio
with load balancers and firewalls.

4) Velostrata – Google acquired this cloud migration technology in 2018 to

augment it for Kubernetes. Velostrata delivers two significant capabilities –
stream on-prem physical/virtual machines to create replicas in GCE
instances and convert existing VMs into Kubernetes applications (Pods).
This is the industry's first physical-to-Kubernetes (P2K) migration tool
built by Google. This capability is available as Anthos Migrate, which is still
in beta.

5) Anthos Config Management - Kubernetes is an extensible and policy-

driven platform. Since Anthos’ customers will have to deal with multiple
Kubernetes deployments running across a variety of environments, Google
attempts to simplify configuration management through Anthos. From
deployment artifacts, configuration settings, network policies, secrets and
passwords, Anthos Config Management can maintain and apply the
configuration to one or more clusters. Think of this technology as a version-
controlled, secure, central repository of all things related to policy and
configuration.

6) Stackdriver – Stackdriver brings observability to Anthos infrastructure

and applications. Customers can track the state of clusters running within
Anthos along with the health of applications deployed in each managed
cluster. It acts as the centralized monitoring, logging, tracing, and
observability platform.

7) GCP Cloud Interconnect – No hybrid cloud platform is complete without

high-speed connectivity between the enterprise data center and the cloud
infrastructure. Cloud Interconnect can deliver speeds up to 100Gbps while
connecting the data center with the cloud. Customers can also use Telco
networks offered by Equinix, NTT Communications, Softbank and others
for extending their data center to GCP.

8) GCP Marketplace – Google has created a curated list of ISV and open
source applications that can run on Kubernetes. Customers can deploy
applications such as Cassandra database and GitLab in Anthos with the
one-click installer. Eventually, Google may offer a private catalog of apps
maintained by internal IT.

Google’s product management team did a great job stacking up the services
for Anthos