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Google Markets Anthos as Big Red Easy Button

Google claims its Anthos product is the easy button of cloud services. Will Anthos be able to provide enterprises with the full value of cloud without the work?

In a livestreamed presentation on April 10, 2019, Urs Hölzle, Google’s SVP of technical infrastructure, said, “Cloud is too hard today, and it’s our job to make it simpler,” and proclaimed that “Anthos is the future of cloud.”

Anthos is more like a solution stack than a single product. It includes services for container orchestration, service management, and configuration and policy management. Hölzle promised that users can move their app to Anthos and gain benefits such as improved security posture through two-factor authentication, whether running the apps on premises or in the cloud.

Our Take

Throughout the broadcast Hölzle and others kept repeating a mantra: You won’t have to change your applications or do any of the hard architecture work. Use Google’s tools, and we’ll do all that for you!

It would be poor form for an analyst to comment that these claims are likely overstated. Google probably is offering some useful tools. But I’m left wondering whether enterprises can take full advantage of cloud features and services without changing a single thing in their applications or architectures.

Can Google really offer the holy grail of running your existing applications as they are and still gaining all the value of the increased agility of the cloud? Enterprises will have to see if this easy button works as advertised.

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