GoogleNextOnAir invites us to connect digitally, collaborate, and solve together the most important challenges that businesses face today. Wizeline is a Google Cloud Partner and we would like to share with our customers and community what we learned during week 7 of this fully-digital event. If you want to access all the content, register today and learn about Cloud AI, Data Analytics, and more.

Influenced by a growing concern to reduce cost and speed up innovation, almost 60% of cloud decision-makers have accelerated their move to the cloud. Last week’s theme at Google Next OnAir was Application Modernization. Google shared what’s new for its Application Modernization platform, Anthos, which provides a great developer experience, offers open hybrid and multi-cloud solutions, and brings top-notch security.

Google Anthos customers have seen great results so far, notably:

• 35% cost saving with migration 
• 75% cost saving with automation and refactoring

Unlock continuous innovation with Google Anthos 

Deploying continuous innovation projects offer companies a substantial competitive advantage, while organizations that rely on traditional approaches put their customers and revenue at risk. Wizeline has experienced first-hand that companies are able to achieve more when they migrate to environments that can foster productivity, agility, and take advantage of cloud capabilities. 

Businesses across industries are motivated to move into the cloud for scalability and access to innovative services. Built on open standards like Kubernetes, Istio, and Knative, Anthos enables portability and agility for continuous innovation while avoiding being locked into a single vendor.

Key challenges for modernizing existing workloads: 

• Core product team is often distracted by tasks that could be automated
• Too much time spent dealing with compliance, audits, or security concerns instead of focusing on continuous delivery and/or automation and innovation
• Application management in multiple environments; multi-cloud and hybrid adding constant complexity and inconsistency 
• Lift and shift might fall short in some scenarios by not addressing all operational needs 
• Traditional hybrid approaches and architectures often create confusion from complex use cases that become abandoned quickly
• Rewriting applications completely is not a viable option for many existing workloads such as legacy and commercial off-the-shelf apps
• Uncertainty on managing complexity and figuring out which best practices to follow

Modernization is a continuous journey:

• Migration: Build on the skills and code you already have. Focus on application login, not on infrastructure. Maximize portability through open sources integrations and frameworks. Secure and monitor by default
• Modernize with Anthos: Accelerate rate to deliver innovation to more lines of business. Get access to end-to-end development tooling: IDE extensions, open-source integrations, fully managed cloud services
• Consistency and automation in processes: Automate release process with CI/CD, secure frequent trusted deployment to allow for faster innovation and create room for creativity, give developers the autonomy they need
• Access to more innovation: Having your application on Google Cloud allows you to tap into other parts of the Google Cloud Platform. For example, in a financial services scenario use Machine Learning to find fraudulent transactions

Increase agility within Anthos

Anthos provides benefits to multiple roles in an IT organization, including app developers, security admins, and platform operators. For example, Anthos modernizes on-premise or cloud applications by leveraging containers. A unified management experience across environments allows for a successful, agile, and transformational business driven by modern, secure, and scalable applications running on a reliable open source technology like Kubernetes. It also makes the process consistent, secure, and extensible, with a flexible and predictable pricing model.

Anthos can easily integrate with your existing systems (such as identity management) but can also provide mechanisms to manage new and existing policies. Anthos’ simplified security management promotes writing all security rules as ‘code’ to make it more manageable to developers and operators.

Application modernization customers have seen great results so far: (Source: Forrester, “New Technology Projection: The Total Economic Impact of Anthos,” 2019)

• 23-38% reduced non-coding activities for developers
• 58-75% accelerated applications migrations
• Up to 55% increase in operational efficiency
• Up to 75% improvement in the efficiency of running security tasks
• 13x improvement in time to market (lead time) 

Google Cloud helps businesses reduce complexity:

• Varied cloud solutions: Some companies have teams using different multi-cloud and hybrid solutions. Anthos enables application deployment and management on-premise and across clouds with 100% software solution and no hardware lock-in built on open standards.
• Clarity about where to start: GCP can offer benchmarks with your industry peers and feedback on prioritization
• Move into the future of applications: Create applications with containerized microservices, managed through a declarative system with a single control experience that uses a service mesh that spans all application locations
• Consistent operational and developer experience: Accelerate a multi-cloud strategy through Google’s best practices for running applications at massive scale and adopting an SRE operational mindset by minimizing business disruption and improving business continuity

New updates for Anthos

• Improved developer and operator efficiency: Simple service operations, SRE best practices for business continuity, common interfaces across hybrid and multi-cloud, easily integrate other Kubernetes clusters from cloud providers such as AWS and Azure, and improved services for service networking controls and visibility 
  • Anthos for Bare Metal: Run on-prem to minimize unnecessary overhead. With Bare Metal support for Anthos, dependencies on VMware are removed which means Anthos it even easier to deploy in hybrid and multi-cloud environments
• Accelerate innovation with Google-managed services: AI services are coming to Anthos environments
  • Hybrid AI: speech-to-text on-prem to have full control over your infrastructure
• Relentless focus on security: Simplified release management, automated software updates and security patches, scanned pre-deploy and runtime images
  • Anthos Identity Services: Extend your existing identity solutions to work with Anthos  
• Anthos Service Mesh: Now allows extended configuration management to unmanaged third-party Kubernetes clusters along with Anthos GKE, which extends security, networking, and observability capabilities by providing seamless integration
• Enhanced Migrate for Anthos: Streamlined developer experience focused on building on top of Google Anthos migration APIs to enable automation and build repeatable and scalable workflows for managing the migration of your applications programmatically.