Google Anthos now available on Nutanix HCI

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)'s Anthos is now available on Nutanix's hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), marking the start of a new partnership to help drive cloud-native application development.

Nutanix's Sean Roth and Luke Congdon explain in a blog that more companies are adopting cloud-native containers and technologies, however some are overwhelmed by how complex Kubernetes and its wider ecosystem can be.

At the heart of this issue is a desire to bring public cloud and on-premise environment into Kubernetes infrastructure - a desire that Google responded to with its application management platform Anthos, designed for Google Kubernetes Engine customers that want to keep it on-premise.

Nutanix and Google partnered to pair GKE with a 'born in the cloud' architecture that Anthos can work with across on-premise and cloud environments.

Anthos, which includes GKE, GKE on-prem, and the Anthos Config Management Console, enables unified multicloud Kubernetes management.

That means developers can write an application only once and deploy it across different cloud infrastructures. When it comes to on-premise infrastructure, though, it can often be difficult to configure and operate multicloud Kubernetes.

Roth and Congdon explain, "Enterprise IT teams often run into major issues when trying to build on-prem Kubernetes environments using their existing legacy infrastructure. This is because traditional servers, storage, and networking solutions aren't architected for the way that Kubernetes and containers use IT resources.

"Kubernetes is a very dynamic platform, and if underlying resources can't be provisioned and scaled in lock-step with an application's needs, organizations will miss out on the agility benefits of going 'cloud native'.

Nutanix's HCI supports Anthos by providing ease of configuration, as well as resiliency and scalability.

Roth and Condon say that Nutanix HCI also allows users to choose their preferred hardware. It also integrates solutions for management, storage, and virtualisation.

The partnership with Nutanix is one of Google's Anthos on-premise solutions for bare metal. This means organisations can leverage their own IT infrastructure (hardware, networking, and operating systems) to run Anthos.

Google states that the minimal system requirement to run Anthos on bare metal at the edge is two nodes with a minimum of 4 cores, and 32 GB RAM, and 128GB of disk space with no specialized hardware.

"We developed Anthos to help all organizations to tackle multi-cloud, taking advantage of modern cloud-native technologies like containers, serverless, service mesh, and consistent policy management; both in the cloud or on-premises. Now, with the option of running Anthos on bare metal, there are even more ways to enjoy the benefits of this modern cloud application stack," Google states.