Google LLC announced at its Cloud Next UK 2019 event the general availability of a new tool that makes it easier for enterprises to migrate their applications from on-premises and public cloud environments to its Anthos hybrid cloud platform.

Launched earlier this year, Google Anthos 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 makes it easy to build flexible new apps, but Google also wants customers to consider using it to modernize their existing applications too. And that’s what “Migrate for Anthos,” is all about, providing a simple way for 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.

“Migrate for Anthos makes it easy to modernize your applications without a lot of manual effort or specialized training,” Jennifer Lin, Google Cloud’s vice president of product management, and Pali Bhat, Google Cloud’s vice president of product and design, said in a co-authored blog post. “After upgrading your on-prem systems to containers with Migrate for Anthos, you’ll benefit from a reduction in OS-level management and maintenance, more efficient resource utilization, and easy integration with Google Cloud services for data analytics, AI and ML, and more.”

In an unrelated announcement, Google revealed its landed a major new customer: British telecommunications firm Vodafone Group plc, which has selected Google Cloud as its “strategic cloud platform for data analytics, business intelligence and machine learning.” Vodafone said it plans to use Google’s services to create a new real-time data analytics platform called Vodafone Neuron that will “act as a brain and driver for AI and business intelligence” at the company.

Photo: Google