Part 1 – A brief overview of Amazon AWS Outpost, Azure Arc and Google Anthos fundamentals with a High Level Architecture view for Telco & Cloud Business Units
There are various Hybrid Cloud Solutions available from Cloud Providers including IBM/RedHat, Microsoft, Amazon, VMware cloud on AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. IBM/RedHat has IBM Cloud Pak, IBM Cloud Satellite, RedHat Openshift Virtualization and Red Hat OpenStack. Microsoft offers Azure Stack and Azure Arc and Amazon offers AWS Outposts to its customers interested in setting up a hybrid cloud. Google Cloud on the other hand is offering Google Anthos as the solution for its hybrid cloud customers.
There are some common hybrid cloud use cases that many organizations are utilizing as they extend their on-premises networks and private cloud into the public cloud.
For Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architecture, cloud service providers (CSP) like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud have been innovating with new features and particularly they break their public cloud borders to support Custom infrastructure or hardware supported services in Private Data Center to extend these CSP offerings to private cloud environments with Telco DataCenters.
Amazon AWS Outpost, Google Anthos and Azure Arc extends their support for hybrid cloud to support cloud service deployment on private cloud like VMWare or OpenShift. Amazon also supports such a facility through their Outposts which used to work on AWS infrastructure to be extended for private cloud platforms thus enabling AWS distribution like EC2 clusters on private cloud environment.
AWS overcomes the demerits of Amazon AWS Outposts with more advanced service using AWS EKS Anywhere which extends Elastic Kubernates Service (EKS) distribution to be used in private cloud infrastructure on a custom data center environment
AWS EKS Anywhere can be easily considered as direct competitor for Google Anthos or Azure Arc and runs self-managed services on VMWare vSphere and can be deployed on any cloud platform. It can support application service communication through proxying using App Mesh and Kubernates distribution and deployment services using Flux services.
Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by delivering a consistent multi-cloud and on-premises management platform. Azure Arc enables you to manage your entire environment, with a single pane of glass, by projecting your existing resources into Azure Resource Manager. You can now manage virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases as if they are running in Azure.
Google Cloud Anthos, customers can take advantage of their existing on-premises or public cloud investments by allowing them to modernize their applications and run them anywhere. At its core, Anthos uses the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and other existing GCP services to provide an easy hybrid pathway and familiar development experience for engineering teams already using Google Cloud.
Google Cloud Anthos and Microsoft Azure Arc have similar technical approaches; they both leverage Kubernetes and containers to provide a seamless experience anywhere – on-premises, in their own public cloud platform, or in a competitor’s cloud.
AWS Outposts, on the other hand, focuses solely on the on-premises use cases. Moreover, by using hardware provided by AWS itself, Outposts effectively prevents multi cloud scenarios and even the use of your own hardware.
Azure Arc, which also supports edge computing environments that enable customers to deploy in any infrastructure.
Google Anthos provides additional tools for converting virtual and bare-metal workloads to containers. This enables them to run in Google Kubernetes Engine, and, therefore, on Anthos.
Conclusion
Services like Google Anthos, Azure Arc, and Amazon AWS Outposts, however, are great additions to the wide array of options available to public cloud customers. When used carefully and correctly, companies that were once lagging behind can make huge leaps toward cloud adoption.
These services also provide a holistic development experience to engineering teams with hybrid architectures. Nonetheless, keep in mind that there are no silver bullets, and you should definitely do your homework before jumping into any of these solutions !
❗️In the next article, I will be sharing the Installation and Configuration Steps of Azure Arc Kubernetes service and testing it on an application. This structure will also be communicating with the service on Cloud Azure. It will not use any submariner!
