Google LLC today announced some key updates to its Anthos application platform, enabling it to support more workloads in different computing environments at a reduced cost.

Google Anthos is a hybrid cloud application development platform that runs atop the open-source 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.

With Anthos, applications are typically 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 plays a role by making it easier to manage large clusters of containerized apps.

The most important update being announced today means that Anthos is finally living up to its hybrid cloud name. The platform is getting its long-promised support for multicloud deployments, starting with Amazon Web Services. Support for Microsoft Azure is also now available in preview.

“Now, you can consolidate all your operations across on-premises, Google Cloud, and other clouds starting with AWS,” Jennifer Lin, Google Cloud’s vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post.

Supporting multiple clouds has been a key goal of Anthos since its inception, as it means customers don’t need to forsake their existing investments in on-premises and other clouds, yet they can still use a common management layer for all of their applications and services.

Google is also extending Anthos’ management framework to support more traditional or legacy workloads.

“Whether your organization is a born-in-the-cloud digital native or a traditional enterprise, it can be hard to manage workloads consistently, and at scale,” Lin said. “With this latest release, we are making managing diverse environments easier than ever before, with deeper support for virtual machines.”

The update makes it possible to manage polices for virtual machines running on Google Cloud in the same way it already manages policies for software containers. “This reduces the likelihood of configuration errors due to manual intervention while speeding up time to delivery,” Lin said.

Meanwhile, Anthos Service Mesh, a dedicated infrastructure layer enables application components to communicate with each other, now supports applications running in VMs. With this, teams can now consistently manage policies and security across various workloads running on Google Cloud, on-premises or in other clouds.

Finally, Lin provided details of a couple of forthcoming updates that should help organizations drive down costs and reduce inefficiencies. The updates will allow Anthos to run on bare metal servers, which are physical servers dedicated to a single tenant. Bare-metal servers are an alternative to hypervisor servers, where multiple users share a virtual server’s compute, storage and other resources.

“This is great for demanding workloads that require bare metal for performance or regulatory reasons,” Lin said.

Bare-metal servers will also enable another forthcoming capability called Anthos on Edge, which will allow users to deploy applications and workloads outside their data centers and public cloud environments, at edge locations such as branch offices, retail stores and remote sites. The last two updates will be made available later this year, Lin said.

“Google surprised the industry with its Anthos offering a little more than 12 months ago, announcing the first multicloud compute platform,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. “It’s good to see Google delivering on its promise to make multicloud support for Google Cloud and AWS generally available. Workload portability is what enterprises want in order to avoid being locked-in to specific cloud infrastructure.”

Photo of Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai: Google