Google’s Anthos blooms onto Istio, Cloud Run

Google’s Anthos blooms onto Istio, Cloud Run

Google has fleshed out its Anthos service, tying it to the Istio service mesh and extending it to the Cloud Run serverless service it launched earlier this year.

As Google put it, “A service mesh uses high-performance and lightweight proxies to bring security, resiliency, and visibility to service communications, freeing your developers to do what they do best: build great applications. A service mesh helps you manage the lifecycle and policies for this intelligent data plane and gives you secure and easy-to-manage microservices-based applications.”

In Anthos’ case, it is built on Istio APIs, and promises “a unified administrative interface, and provides uniform traffic controls that span them both” and “gives you deep visibility into your application traffic, thereby improving your development experience and making it easier to troubleshoot these complex environments.”

At the same time, Google has extended the Cloud Run platform it put into beta earlier this year, with the launch of a beta of Cloud Run for Anthos, which Google claims “enables you to be more agile by letting you write code like you always do—without having to learn advanced Kubernetes concepts.” In other words, it abstracts away the infrastructure management. 

The page for the platform says that, “Many serverless platforms add constraints around support for languages, libraries, or even restrict the way you code.” We wonder who Google is talking about there. It also claims to support “any language, any library, any binary.”

There are a few differences with the existing Cloud Run service. The existing service is entirely Google based, auto scales up to 1,000 containers instances, which can be increased though GCP support, and doesn’t offer access to VPC/Computer Engine or Istio. The Athos service is – by definition – hybrid, is limited by the capacity of users’ Anthos GCE cluster, and offers VPC/Computer Engine access, and of course Istio.