Recently Google announced the expansion of its Distributed Cloud Platform by bringing in Anthos on-premise (for VMware vSphere and Anthos bare metal services). The offering is called Google Distributed Cloud Virtual — a software-and services-only solution.
Earlier this year, Google released the Distributed Cloud Edge Offering into general availability (GA) after its announcement at Next’21. Now, with Google Distributed Cloud, Virtual customers can bring Google Cloud’s software stack to their own data center servers. Moreover, with the service, they can operate various on-premises applications using the same Google Cloud APIs, control planes, hardware, and tooling as their cloud-hosted apps.
The Distributed Cloud Platform now consists of Edge, Hosted, and Virtual providing a consistent set of development, security, and management experiences across any IT environment an enterprise can select, all powered by a single Anthos API. It includes the freedom to choose between different system form factors, software-only or integrated hardware and software solutions, and whether enterprises want to be self-managed or managed by Google or another trusted partner.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/anthos-on-prem-and-bare-metal-are-now-gdc-virtual
With Google Distributed Cloud Virtual deployed on the infrastructure, it provides a software-only extension of Google Cloud, allowing users to:
- Leverage the Google Cloud Console to provision Anthos clusters on vSphere and automate provisioning and maintenance of GKE clusters on VMs and existing bare metal infrastructure based on their requirements and form factors
- To create and deploy containerized workloads straight to Kubernetes or an application runtime
- Apply federated security, access control, and identity management across cloud and on-premises clusters
Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
Sometimes marketing changes; what matters to CxOs is that the services continue to be offered. This is the case with Google retiring its former Anthos branding for Google Distribute Cloud. (GDC). And even better, the GDC Edge offering and the new GDC Virtual offering can be managed with a single pane of glass.
In addition, Chen Goldberg, a GM, and VP of engineering, Cloud Native Runtimes at Google, stated in a blog post:
GDC Virtual offers a new consumption model for customers built upon a proven Anthos stack as a software-only deployment option on your infrastructure. This enables modernization efforts to progress in place at a pace that makes sense for your business.
With their Distributed Cloud Platform offering, Google competes with the two other public cloud providers, AWS and Microsoft. They offer services that extend their platforms to on-premises with Azure Stack and AWS Outposts.