Google has been in a fight for third place in public cloud, and a distant third at that. For some time, many (myself included) have wondered how Google would gain market share, beating IBM for third and even closing in on the leaders. Now we may see the first clear signals of their overall strategy.
The problem Google had was that the public cloud market is divided into two segments. The first, the “startup community”, targets social media and content startups who need to be able to scale out quickly without investing a ton of VC money in their own data centers. The second is the enterprise space, who are not interested in “migrating to the cloud” in general, but in using the cloud to add agile pieces to current applications. Amazon has locked the first segment and Microsoft the second, and IBM’s deal for Red Hat makes them a contender for that space too.
Google is the biggest OTT, and so it’s hard to get social media and content startups to commit to Google cloud, given that Google is probably already competing with them and is likely to start competing if they’re not. That leaves the enterprise space, and Google has no enterprise products or tools to leverage, as Microsoft does. However, nobody really has pride of place in “hybrid cloud”, the combination of public cloud and enterprise data center that’s the current battleground for cloud providers. There’s a window for Google to jump in, if they can be decisive, before Amazon or Microsoft lock the space up.
Their answer is Anthos, a hybrid model of Kubernetes that’s designed to create a “universal” framework for deployment and management of containers across virtually anything and everything. Yes, that includes other public clouds, and that’s an important piece of what I believe Google’s strategy to be.
Anthos is essentially a federation model, meaning that rather than establishing a single container platform that spans multiple infrastructure options (as the combination of Apache Mesos and DC/OS does), each environment has, or can have, its own container platform. These are federated via Anthos tools to create unified deployment and management, as seen from the top where management, monitoring, and operations controls are applied.
Federation is a high-level relationship among autonomous elements, and the key to making it effective is a pair of concepts—unification and subduction. You need to unify the domains in terms of capabilities at the minimum, and at the tools level if possible. That simplifies treating them as a continuum, meaning connecting them so that information and components pass among them and that performance is harmonized across everything. You then need to subduct them at the policy and management level, creating an overarching set of rules that govern the domains and manage their interconnection with each other.
Anthos is based on three Google-initiated open-source pieces. The first is Kubernetes, which hardly needs an introduction. It’s the container orchestration tool that Google developed and that has literally revolutionized application development and deployment thinking. The second is Istio, a service mesh technology that’s designed to make components/services/microservices accessible in any environment. Istio is quickly gaining traction in the industry. The third is Knative, a Kubernetes-hosted serverless framework that’s portable to wherever Kubernetes can run.
A user of Google Kubernetes Service (GKS) can add in a “local” or data center Kubernetes domain, including Istio and Knative, and then use a cloud and monitoring connector to link the domains. If you don’t have a Kubernetes domain to add, you can use the Migrate tool to convert VMs to containers and then link them with GKS as before. If you have VMs hosted on another cloud, you can migrate them the same way. It’s not yet clear whether managed Kubernetes services on other providers are/will be supported, but users who hosted their own Kubernetes on VMs in other clouds should have no problem with migration.
The user benefit of this federated approach is that you can secure a highly harmonious operations platform for applications across hybrid/multi-cloud deployments without doing anything revolutionary to your current applications. It should be possible to cloudburst from the data center to the cloud, even to multi-cloud, and even in theory to redeploy between cloud providers, though the examples of this aren’t fully developed or clear, so be sure to ask Google if that’s your plan.
Google’s benefit? This is a way of creating a true multi-cloud that accentuates hybridization with the data center but at the same time absorbs other (largely competing) cloud commitments, which users admit are in their early stages today. By embracing what enterprises have already done, Google gets a position in hybrid cloud evolution. That they’re basing all this on open-source means that, in combination with their support for competing clouds, they’re not locking users into a single strategy.
Equipment vendors are also major Google targets with this initiative. Hybrid cloud is the only model of IT that preserves investment in the data center, which surely is a big issue to the players who sell servers and platform software. Google has trotted out references from nearly all the major players, and is actively working to promote their participation in the creation of federated IT communities.
The market itself benefits from this move, because anyone who’s tried to adopt modern software componentization principles (microservices, functional computing, serverless, etc.) knows that while containers are becoming a necessary condition for success, they’re not a sufficient condition. The Kubernetes ecosystem, something I’ve blogged about before, is more valuable than Kubernetes alone, but most users aren’t clear just what’s supposed to be inside it. Google is laying out an architecture for agile, distributable, applications that includes enough elements to fulfill basic development and operations requirements. Kubernetes plus Istio plus Knative equals ecosystem. Just knowing all that is helpful.
Is it enough to get Google over the top? The biggest problem with Anthos is its biggest benefit—openness and inclusiveness. You can’t easily differentiate your solutions using tools that everyone can copy, and if you leave your competitors in place to facilitate migrating to your own services, you leave those competitors a position to exploit in trying to migrate users away from you and back to them.
What Google needs to do here is to develop some clear differentiators, things that they can offer that others have a problem duplicating. They also need to do more work socializing the application development and deployment implications of the Kubernetes ecosystem they’ve defined, so that enterprises will build applications that take full advantage of it. With that combination they can brand the ecosystem with a decisive Google stamp, something that would force competitors to either acknowledge Google’s leadership in the space or try to roll their own approach. It will be a challenge, but it can be done.