While there is a great deal of evidence that enterprises are moving en masse to the cloud, one key piece of data puts the transformation in perspective. According to statistics cited by Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian, 80% of workloads are still on-premises.

This percentage alone offers a reason why Google Cloud introduced Anthos, a platform designed to run applications on-premises or in the public cloud, at this week’s Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco.

“You can lift and shift and move to cloud and then modernize it, but it’s also perfectly fine to modernize on-premises and do my rewrites in a safe, controlled environment that I understand,” said Eric Brewer (pictured), a Google fellow and vice president of infrastructure at Google Cloud, in addition to serving as a professor at University of California at Berkeley. “Having those two options is actually an important change with Anthos.”

Brewer spoke at Cloud Next with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. They discussed customer motivation for ultimately moving workloads to the cloud and Google’s significant involvement in open-source solutions (see the full interview with transcript here).

Transitioning to cloud

Some enterprises might want to transition as quickly as possible to the cloud, but this isn’t possible for the near term because of a substantial investment in data centers, regulatory issues or workloads that are simply too messy to move. Most of the customers in discussion with Google have indicated they want to make the transition to cloud, according to Brewer. When they do, the company will be ready for them.

“They’re starting to use frameworks that we’re really good at,” Brewer said. “If they’re starting to use Kubernetes and containers, I like our chances for winning their business down the road. I believe we have a much better chance to be their future cloud.”

There is an unmistakable open-source flavor surrounding Anthos. The platform is built on open-source technologies, such as Kubernetes, Istio and Knative.

“We’re making a pretty fundamental bet on open source; it’s a deeper bet than others are making,” said Brewer, who noted that Google had already made significant contributions with the introduction of Kubernetes and TensorFlow. “This is the way we’re going to approach this thing, especially with hybrid and multicloud. In my mind, there really is no other way to do multicloud other than open source because this space is too fast-moving.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next:

Photo: SiliconANGLE