Google LLC has lagged behind major competitors in the game of cloud, taking a 4.6% share in 2020 against Amazon Web Services Inc.’s 43.6% and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure’s 14.3%. But the good news is that strategy changes last year look to be paying off as Google Cloud Platform reported a 49.3% growth spurt in 2020, estimated to be faster than both AWS and Microsoft.

Now, making a major move in the cloud game, GCP is layering third-party apps on top of Anthos and spanning the divide between containerized microservices-based applications and virtual machines.

“Having the simplicity and the efficiency of operating VMs like containers on top of Google Distributed Cloud built on Anthos is extremely powerful,” said Sachin Gupta (pictured), vice president and general manager of infrastructure at Google Cloud.

Gupta spoke with David Nicholson, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation on the technology behind the Google Distributed Cloud announcement made at Google Cloud Next ’21.

Google Distributed Cloud combines third-party hardware, Anthos and open-source tech

The majority of Google Cloud’s customers are in the process of moving applications to a containerized environment with Kubernetes. But some workloads just aren’t made for the cloud. Low latency processing requirements, data security, privacy, compliance and residency restrictions can all keep data on-premises. Listening to customer demand for a location-agnostic solution, Google Distributed Cloud was created to provide computational power, storage, automation and simplicity across cloud environments, on-premises and at the edge.

The solution layers third-party hardware from companies Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems, Nvidia and NetApp together with Google’s hybrid multicloud software layer, Anthos. Layered on top are open-source technologies; for example, those built on Kubernetes.

“We offer a containerized environment, a VM environment that enables both Google first-party services, as well as third-party services that customers may choose to deploy on top of this infrastructure,” Gupta said.

This means the management of the entire infrastructure, top to bottom, is delivered to Google directly, allowing customers to focus on applications and business initiatives rather than infrastructure complexity.

“They can just leave that to us,” Gupta said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next ’21 and one of many CUBE Conversations:

Photo: SiliconANGLE