Don’t just move to the cloud, modernize with Google Cloud

by Suman Gupta

India, November 20, 2019: Our customers tell us they don’t just want to migrate their applications from point A to point B, they want to modernize their applications with cloud-native technologies and techniques, wherever those applications may be.

Today, we’re excited to tell you about a variety of new customers that are using Anthos to transform their application portfolio, as well as new cloud migration, API management, and application development offerings:

• New customers leveraging Anthos for a variety of on-prem, cloud and edge use cases

• The general availability of Migrate for Anthos

• Apigee hybrid in general availability

• The general availability of Cloud Code

Accelerating app modernization with Anthos

Anthos was the first open app modernization platform to offer a unified control plane and service delivery across diverse cloud environments—managed cloud, on-premises and edge. Since it became generally available in the spring, organizations across a variety of industries and geographies have turned to Anthos to bring the benefits of cloud, containers and microservices to their applications.

According to the findings from Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study, customers adopting Anthos have seen up to 5x return on investment based on the savings from ongoing license and support costs, and the incremental savings from operations and developer productivity. For one customer in the financial services industry, rolling out new features and updates to their core banking application used to take at least a quarter. Now with Anthos, they were able to eliminate months long development and release cycles, and roll out on a weekly basis. That’s a 13x improvement on time to market.

This week, several new European Anthos customers will take the stage at Next UK to talk about how they’re using Anthos to transform their IT operations.

Kaeser Kompressoren SE of Coburg, Germany, is a provider of compressed air products and services. The company needed a consistent platform to deploy and manage existing on-prem SAP workloads, like SAP Data Hub, and also wanted to be able to tap into other services running in Google Cloud to get more value from those environments.

“Application modernization is enabling business innovation for Kaeser,” said Falko Lameter, CIO. “To gain better insights from data, we knew we needed to incorporate advanced machine learning and data analytics in all our applications. We chose Google Cloud’s Anthos because it offered the flexibility to incrementally modernize our legacy application on-premises without business disruption, while allowing us to run other applications on Anthos in Google Cloud and take advantage of its managed data analytics and ML/AI services.”

Then there’s Denizbank. Based in Turkey, Denizbank provides a variety of commercial banking services, and established the first Digital Banking Department in Turkey in 2012. Denizbank turned to Anthos for an open application modernization platform to help it develop its next-generation mobile banking applications.

“We operate in 11 different countries and have to comply with various regulatory requirements like data locality and sovereignty, which mandates some or all applications to reside on premises in certain countries, while the rest of the apps can move to the cloud in other countries,” said Dilek Duman, COO of DenizBank. “We chose Google Cloud’s Anthos for its flexibility to modernize our existing application investments with ease, and to deliver AI/ML powered software faster while improving operational security and governance. Anthos gives us the ability to have a unified management view of our hybrid deployments, giving us a consistent platform to run our banking workloads across environments.” 

Anthos is even starting to be deployed to edge locations, where, thanks to its 100% software-based design, it can run on any number of hardware form factors. We’re in advanced discussions with customers in telecommunications, retail, manufacturing and entertainment about using Anthos for edge use cases, as well as with global hardware OEMs.

Move and modernize with Migrate for Anthos

In addition to leveraging cloud technology for their on-premises environments with Anthos, customers also want to simultaneously migrate to the cloud and modernize with containers. That’s why we’re happy to announce the general availability of Migrate for Anthos, which provides a fast, low-friction path to convert physical servers or virtual machines from a variety of sources (on-prem, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Compute Engine) directly into containers in Anthos GKE.

Migrate for Anthos makes it easy to modernize your applications without a lot of manual effort or specialized training. After upgrading your on-prem systems to containers with Migrate for Anthos, you’ll benefit from a reduction in OS-level management and maintenance, more efficient resource utilization, and easy integration with Google Cloud services for data analytics, AI and ML, and more.

DevFactory aims to offload repetitive tasks in software development so that dev teams can focus on coding and productivity. As advocates for optimization through containers, they found Migrate for Anthos a key way to help deliver on their goals:

“We usually see less than 1% resource utilization in data centers. Migrate for Anthos is a remarkable tool that allows us to migrate data center workloads to the cloud in a few simple steps,” said Rahul Subramaniam, CEO, Devfactory. “By automatically converting servers and virtual machines into containers with Migrate for Anthos, we get better resource utilization and dramatically reduced costs along with managed infrastructure in the end state, which makes this a very exciting and much-needed solution.”

Migrate for Anthos is available at no additional cost, and can be used with or without an Anthos subscription.

API-first, everywhere, with Apigee hybrid 

To drive modernization and innovation, enterprises are increasingly adopting API-first approaches to connecting services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. To address the need for hybrid API management, we’re announcing the general availability of Apigee hybrid, giving you the flexibility to deploy your API runtimes in a hybrid environment, while using cloud-based Apigee capabilities such as developer portals, API monitoring, and analytics. Apigee hybrid can be deployed as a workload on Anthos, giving you the benefits of an integrated Google Cloud stack, with Anthos’ automation and security benefits.

Gap Inc. uses Apigee to publish, secure, and analyze APIs and easily onboard the development teams working with those APIs. Apigee hybrid will help Gap Inc. overcome the traditional tradeoffs between on-premises and cloud, providing the best of both worlds.

“With Apigee hybrid, we can have an easy to manage, localized runtime for scenarios where latency or data sensitivity require it. At the same time, we can continue to enjoy all the benefits of Apigee such as Apigee’s developer portal and its rich API-lifecycle management capabilities,” said Patrick McMichael, Enterprise Architect at Gap Inc.

Simplifying the developer experience

Google Cloud application development tools are designed to help you simplify creating apps for containers and Kubernetes, incorporate security and compliance into your pipelines, and scale up or down depending on demand, so you only pay for what you use.

With these goals in mind, last week, we announced the general availability of Cloud Run and Cloud Run for Anthos. Cloud Run is a managed compute platform on Google Cloud that lets you run serverless containers on on a fully managed environment or on Anthos. With Cloud Run fully managed, you can easily deploy and run stateless containers written in any language, and enjoy serverless benefits such as automatic scale up and scale down and pay-for-use—without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.

Cloud Run for Anthos, meanwhile, brings those same serverless developer experience to Anthos managed clusters, giving developers access to a modern, serverless compute platform while their organization modernizes its on-prem environment with Kubernetes.

Easier Kubernetes development with Cloud Code

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of another important member of the Google Cloud application development stack: Cloud Code, which lets developers write, debug and deploy code to Google Cloud or any Kubernetes cluster through extensions to popular Integrated Developer Environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ.

Developers are most productive while working in their favorite IDE. By embracing developers’ existing workflow and tools, Cloud Code makes working with Kubernetes feel like you are working with a local application, while preserving the investment you’ve made to configure your tools to your own specific needs. Cloud Code dramatically simplifies the creation and maintenance of Kubernetes applications.

In addition, Cloud Code speeds up development against Kubernetes by extending the edit-debug-review “inner loop” to the cloud. You get rapid feedback on your changes, ensuring that they’re of high quality. And when it comes to moving code to the production environment, Cloud Code supports popular continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools like Cloud Build.

Finally, with Cloud Code, diagnosing issues does not require a deep understanding of Kubernetes, thanks to connected debuggers and cluster-wide logging that help you address issues all from the context of your favorite tool.

Toward modern, efficient applications

Application modernization means a lot of things to a lot of people. Depending on your environment, it can mean updating VMs to containers and Kubernetes, it can mean moving them to the cloud, or it can mean distributing them to edge locations and unifying workloads with consistent API and service management. For others, application modernization means using cloud-native tools and concepts like serverless and CI/CD. Whatever your definition, we can help you realize your business and modernization goals, achieving greater agility while improving overall governance.

About Google Cloud: Google Cloud is widely recognized as a global leader in delivering a secure, open and intelligent enterprise cloud platform. Our technology is built on Google’s private network and is the product of nearly 20 years of innovation in security, network architecture, collaboration, artificial intelligence and open source software. We offer a simply engineered set of tools and unparalleled technology across Google Cloud Platform and G Suite that help bring people, insights and ideas together. Customers across more than 150 countries trust Google Cloud to modernize their computing environment for today’s digital world.