Today, at Cloud Next 2019 in San Francisco, Google’s annual industry conference, Google announced its Cloud Services Platform, Anthos, for managing hybrid clouds that span on-premise and cloud data centers, and across multi-cloud environments. It is a big deal. It uses Kubernetes to enable migration across environments, is hardware agnostic, supports Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, and is subscription-based with a starting list price of $10,000/month per 100 vCPU block.
There is a thought that Anthos is a shot across the bows of AWS and Azure – and certainly, an approach that abstracts functionality from underlying cloud architecture will impinge on the ‘data gravity’ customer retention approach being used by these vendors. But IBM is at risk with Anthos as well, as the positive reception of its recent Red Hat acquisition is rooted in the promise of a single-vendor approach to providing hybrid and multi-cloud management and orchestration capabilities.
Clearly, Anthos has been developed with large enterprises as the target segment; some enterprise accounts are already early beta customers. To ease the addition of cloud as a core infrastructure platform in these accounts (by simplifying migration across in-premise and cloud environments) Google introduced Anthos Migrate, a service which will auto-migrate VMs from on-premise or other clouds into containers in the Google Kubernetes Engine.
It’s important to note, though, that hybrid cloud management is not only a point of pain within enterprise customers – it is a challenge (and arguably, a more acute issue) within midmarket (100-999 employees) firms. Consider these stats from Techaisle study of 510 US midmarket firms:
- 52% of midmarket firms are using multi-cloud
- 45% of midmarket firms have hybrid cloud environments
- 38% of midmarket firms are using multiple public cloud providers for IaaS and PaaS
- 27% of midmarket firms are planning to adopt G-Suite
- 25% of midmarket firms are challenged by how to migrate from one cloud platform to another
- 18% of midmarket cloud workloads are on hybrid clouds
Data for Europe and Asia/Pacific also very interesting current and planned adoption percentages for hybrid/multi-cloud.
The multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud journey began within midmarket firms much before it became fashionable within enterprises.
