Transitioning to Hybrid Cloud 

The transition to hybrid cloud infrastructures is not new. In fact, many companies have been using hybrid cloud solutions for some time now. However, there are several reasons why businesses should consider moving to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. At the end of July, at the Google Next conference in Tokyo, the company announced its new efforts to expand tools to help regarding the hybrid cloud. These tools expand to consumers that need help with competitor cloud services. 

During the conference, there was an announcement about an extension of Anthos. Anthos is a platform that allows users to deploy applications on-premises or over various cloud providers. A major challenge for the platform is that its users are having a difficult time transitioning existing applications in the virtual machines (VMs) into Anthos. The announcement refers to the new Migrate for Anthos and its goal to conquer that challenge. Efforts include creating an automated path to migrate from VMs to Anthos. 

Since Anthos had gone generally available (GA), there has been an extensive adoption and fascination in the platform. Financial services, retail, healthcare, media, and manufacturing industries all over the world have been keen on the platform and its capabilities. Users can utilize Migrate for Anthos to go from Google Compute Engine, or more generally, from VMs at an existing on-premise location to containers. Before the automation that Migrate for Anthos offers, the process involved reconstructing the content from the VMs into the container. Automating the conversion allows businesses to save money, time, and resources on the migration process.

Google is expanding who they are able to help and win over as customers. They previously only offered migration support for users trying to transition from VMs on Amazon’s service. Now, Google came out with its Migrate for Compute Engine. This helps organizations move from Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Google’s offerings have expanded to appeal to a wider array of consumers. Both Migrate for Anthos and Migrate for Compute Engine use similar technologies that permit workloads on an origin environment to be migrated to Google Cloud. 

Although completely capable, migrations from Azure to Google can be tricky. The main thing is that there is an understanding of what is being run on the VM.  The next step would be to choose a well-suited migration plan. The biggest trouble for migration from Azure to Cloud has to be getting the origin “format” migrated to a new “format”. Google’s Migrate for Compute Engine was designed to hopefully eradicate those difficulties for a smoother migration. 

It does not stop there for Google’s new capabilities. It is looking beyond migrating users from clouds and on-prem environments. Eventually, the hope is to expand connections to the cloud for enterprises. Currently in beta testing, Google has a networking effort called 100G-bps Dedicated Interconnect. This service is supposed to provide a network of connections between Google Cloud and on-premise networks.