Q&A: Google Cloud's Lin Talks Next Phase of Anthos

Getting organizations to see how Anthos might be used in cloud transformation has been on the agenda of late with Google. Early this week, the company held an event to get the application management platform more on the radar of potential users and analysts. The event included discussions on how Anthos can be deployed across complex, hybrid environments and introduced the Anthos Service Mesh for microservices management to deploy and secure services.

The desire to modernize at times can conflict with security demands and other concerns about business disruption. Google introduced Anthos earlier this year for managing applications in an agnostic fashion, including hybrid cloud environments. Financial institutions such as KeyBank, an Anthos user, have regulatory requirements that mean maintaining certain operations on-premise. Jennifer Lin, product management director for Google Cloud, took time from the stage to speak with InformationWeek about where Anthos fits in the still-evolving cloud transformation equation.

What demands are you seeing from organizations that have hybrid environments, and how does Anthos come into play in those circumstances?

“The choice today is based on the flexibility moving forward. We started with the on-prem, hybrid scenario with multicloud coming in the future. We know that customers today are already not locking themselves down to one. From a technology perspective, it’s not like they can use one management layer easily and get the types of capabilities we’re providing through the Kubernetes API server. The fact that Kubernetes is becoming a compute orchestration layer of choice makes it easier for us to say 'if you want to register a cluster that sits in another cloud, today it’s in your own prem but tomorrow it could be running in EC2 [Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud] or Azure Cloud'. That is essentially the equivalent to an on-prem server. The compute and storage can sit somewhere else, the intelligent layer managing it across a secure network.

Read the rest of this interview on InformationWeek.