It is not uncommon for modern enterprise environments to have computed, storage and networking spread out across multiple public cloud environments, in addition to their own data centers. In today’s ever-increasing cloud-first climate, developing applications with such a complex and diverse setup spread across multiple locations is exceedingly difficult. Today, however, Google Cloud and Intel announced a collaboration designed to simplify development for hybrid and multi-cloud environments using Athos on bare metal.
Anthos on bare metal runs atop physical or virtual instances and will run on existing, on-prem physical servers, deployed on an operating system without a hypervisor layer. It supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1/8.2, CentOS 8.1/8.2, or Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS and provides overlay networking and L4/L7 load balancing, though it can also integrate with an enterprise’s existing load balancer. For storage, persistent workloads can be deployed using Container-Storage-Interface (CSI) integration with existing infrastructures.
“With today’s rapidly evolving business climate, enterprises are constantly looking for new ways to modernize their business while leveraging their existing infrastructure. Running Anthos on bare metal using servers based on Intel Xeon Scalable processors will simplify the deployment of a cloud-first approach, opening a wide array of new use cases across retail, telco, and manufacturing industries,” said Jason Grebe, Intel corporate vice president, and general manager the Cloud and Enterprise Solutions Group.
Anthos allow for modernizing existing applications or building cloud-native apps, from virtually anywhere and provides a consistent experience, with centralized management and visibility. Anthos gives developers the ability to package applications into containers and move them between various environments, without having to significantly rework the application, regardless of the underlying cloud infrastructure.
Intel and Google also worked together to develop a pair of reference architectures for Anthos on bare meta, one that targets larger data centers and another for the edge. The data center reference architecture leverages Intel Xeon Gold 6240Y processors, paired to Intel Optane persistent memory, Intel SSD DC S4500 Series drives, and 10/25 GbE Intel Ethernet Adapters. The edge reference architecture is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum and uses a tiny Intel NUC 10 ultra-small form factor system with 10th Gen Intel Core i7-10710U processor, Intel SSD Pro 7600p-based storage and gigabit ethernet.
Dell, HP Enterprise, Atos, Equinix Metal, NVIDIA, and Intel (among others), in addition to storage partners NetApp, Portworx, Pure Storage, and Robin.io have all committed to delivering Anthos on bare metal to their customers and qualifying their respective CSI drivers for use on the platform.
Sourced from Forbes - contributed by Marco Chiappetta