Highlights:

  • Developers and operations teams may now run VMs alongside containers on a common cloud-native architecture, thanks to Anthos’ addition of VM support.
  • The Anthos VM Runtime, which extends and improves KubeVirt technology, is the foundation of the new product.

Google LLC announced that Anthos’ virtual machine support is generally accessible, enabling users to operate Virtual Machines (VMs) and containers on a single, integrated platform connected to the Google Cloud.

Developers and operations teams may now run VMs alongside containers on a shared cloud-native architecture, thanks to Anthos’ addition of VM support. The service delivers consistent container and VM activities with Kubernetes-style declarative configuration and policy enforcement. With self-service deployment, observability, and monitoring, the service is entirely administered through the Google Cloud console, application programming interfaces, and command-line interfaces.

According to Google, the decision to expand Anthos, which was expanded to Google Distributed Cloud in June, to VMs is a result of many businesses continuing to run business-critical workloads in VMs rather than adopting containers and Kubernetes. Although many VMs can be modernized by moving to VMs in Google Cloud or containers, many can’t, at least not so easily.

Situations that may restrict enterprises from adopting containers include a vendor-provided app that hasn’t been upgraded to run in containers or the requirement to have a VM in a data center or edge site for low latency connectivity. In many cases, businesses might not have the resources to containerize a specially developed app. Anthos’ VM support fills this need.

According to Google, during the preview testing phase for the service, it saw interest in VM support in Anthos for retail edge environments, where there is a limited infrastructure footprint and a need to run new container apps and heritage VM apps on only a few hosts.

The Anthos VM Runtime, which extends and improves KubeVirt technology, is the foundation of the new product. For those that want to use Kubernetes but have existing VM-based workloads that are difficult to containerize, the open-source software known as KubeVirt can help.

The Anthos VM Runtime integrates Kubevirt with Anthos on bare metal to make installation and upgrading easier. In addition, management tools are offered to manage VMs with logs and analytics within the Google Cloud operations suite, including out-of-the-box dashboards and alerts.

Support for numerous network interfaces and VLAN integration are among the networking improvements included in the release.

Amr Abdelrazik and Dave Bartoletti, product managers for Anthos, wrote in a blog post, “If you’re an experienced VM admin, you can take advantage of VM high availability and simplified Kubernetes storage management for a familiar yet updated VM management experience. In addition, VM lifecycle management is built into the Google Cloud console for a simplified user experience that integrates with your existing Anthos and Google Cloud authentication and authorization frameworks.”

VM support in Anthos is available for bare-metal systems, also known as Google Distributed Cloud Virtual, through Google Cloud accounts of customers.