Google LLC announced today that its hybrid cloud application development platform Anthos is now available on bare-metal servers, giving customers more choice on how and where to run their hybrid cloud workloads.

Google Anthos is a hybrid cloud application development platform that went live last year. Running 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. The idea is that companies can choose the most suitable infrastructure for each app.

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. Kubernetes plays a central role by making it easier to manage large clusters of containerized apps.

A bare-metal server is one that runs without a base operating system or any installed applications. The customer chooses the operating system, and then workloads are installed directly onto this without using any hypervisor, or virtual machine monitoring software, enabling them to eliminate what is often seen as an unnecessary overhead.

In a blog post today, Amr Abdelrazik, a product manager for Anthos, and Richard Seroter, director of Outbound Product Management, said Anthos on bare metal opens up “new possibilities” for customers both in the cloud and at the edge.

“Some of you want to run Anthos on your existing virtualized infrastructure, but others want to eliminate the dependency on a hypervisor layer, to modernize applications while reducing costs,” they said. “For example, you may consider migrating VM-based apps to containers, and you might decide to run them at the edge on resource-constrained hardware.”

Abdelrazik and Seroter said Anthos on bare metal enables customers to leverage their existing hardware investments, as it has minimum system requirements of just 4 cores, 32 gigabytes of RAM and 128GB of disk space. Customers can choose their own operating system too, with support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1/8.2, CentOS 8.1/8.2 and Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 LTS.

There are two deployment models available, including a standalone model that enables customers to manage every cluster independently, which is most suitable for running workloads at the edge. Alternatively, they can choose the multicluster model, which enables them to manage their workloads as fleets of clusters from a centralized administrative cluster. This model is more suited to users that want to build automation and tooling, or delegate the lifecycle of clusters to individual teams, Google said.

Google has partnered with a number of third-party hardware makers to ensure Anthos on bare metal runs without a hitch, including Atos SE, Dell Technologies Inc., Equinix Metal, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co., Intel Corp., NetApp Inc., Nutanix Inc. and Nvidia Corp. Storage partners such as HPE, NetApp, Pure Storage Inc. and Robin.io are on board too, Google said. Many of those partners have provided reference architectures to help customers get started.

Google said feedback from early adopters has been positive. VideoAmp Inc., which sells a video measurement and optimization platform, said it uses Anthos on bare metal to reduce the operational overheads of managing its application clusters and maximize use of its cloud infrastructure.

“We run real-time compute-intensive applications which enable advertisers to optimize their entire portfolio of linear TV, OTT and digital video to business outcomes,” said VideoAmp’s director of engineering Hector Sahagun. “Kubernetes is a critical part of our strategy because of the scalability, portability, and flexibility it provides our developers. Anthos brings centralized lifecycle and policy management tools, allowing our infrastructure teams to focus on key initiatives instead of the day-to-day management of Kubernetes.”

Image: Google