Google LLC is advancing its hybrid cloud play with a new tool released today that makes it easier for enterprises to migrate their applications from on-premises and public cloud environments to its Anthos platform.

Launched earlier this year, Google Anthos is a hybrid cloud platform that runs atop the Kubernetes container orchestration software. It’s designed to host applications that can run unmodified on both existing on-premises hardware and public clouds, giving companies the option to choose the most suitable infrastructure for each one.

Anthos applications are deployed in software containers, which are used to host the individual components of each app and make them easier to work with. The main benefit is that developers get to use a single set of tools to build and deploy their apps, and push through updates as necessary, no matter what infrastructure those apps are hosted on. Kubernetes makes it easier to manage large clusters of containerized apps.

Anthos is an enabler for building flexible new apps, but Google also wants customers to consider using it to modernize their existing workloads as well. To that end, the company is announcing beta availability of a new tool called “Migrate for Anthos,” which enables virtual machines running on-premises or in the Google Compute Engine service to be moved directly into containers running on Google Kubernetes Engine. The tool also makes it possible to migrate virtual machines from rival cloud services such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure to GKE containers, Google said.

“With this launch, customers can now use Migrate for Anthos to automatically modernize their VMs and move them to containers without any of the complex, manual processes of traditional container modernization strategies,” Eyal Manor, Google Cloud’s vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post. “Our new approach gives you more flexibility to modernize your existing infrastructure investments with ease, even for VMs you’d previously written off as not being able to modernize.”

In addition to Anthos, Google is also giving customers an easy way to move their virtual machines to its Compute Engine service, which is its more traditional, cloud-hosted server infrastructure. The company is updating its “Migrate for Compute Engine” service with beta support for moving workloads from Microsoft Azure to its cloud.

“This complements Migrate for Compute Engine’s existing support for migrating VMs out of Amazon EC2,” Brad Calder, vice president of engineering at Google Cloud, wrote in a second blog post. “As a result, whether you’re migrating between clouds for better agility, to save money, or to increase security, you now have a way to lift and shift into Google Cloud — quickly, easily and cost-effectively.”

Google also found time to update its Service Mesh offering today. Service Mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that controls service-to-service communication over a network. It provides a method for separate parts of an application to communicate with each other.

The updates include general availability of Traffic Director and beta availability of the Layer 7 Internal Load Balancer.

Traffic Director is a scalable and fully managed service mesh control plane that works with the Envoy proxy service to provide resiliency, intelligent load balancing and advanced traffic control features. The main idea with Traffic Director is to abstract away the complexities of application networking.

As for L7 ILB, it’s used to bring load balancing functionality to legacy applications.

“Powered by Traffic Director and Envoy, L7 ILB allows you to deliver rich traffic control to legacy services with minimal toil—and with the familiar experience of using a traditional load balancer,” Calder said. “Deploying L7 ILB is also a great first step toward migrating legacy apps to service mesh.”

Photo: Google