Building and operating in a cloud environment can be compared to piecing together a large puzzle. Organisations integrate the components they deem to be the most appropriate based on their business goals. Once the foundations are in place, an organisation can reap the advantages of greater resource use, increased resilience, and potentially lower costs.

Gartner continues to recognise the importance of cloud and the central role it will take in delivering new digital experiences. But whilst cloud first strategies are adopted by organisations, it does not adequately address how organisations can leverage the potential for their on-premises infrastructure and applications. Whether it be data gravity, legacy entanglements, governance, pricing or security, there are some things that must remain on-premises.

Because there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to cloud computing, using multi-cloud environments (that include on-premises cloud) can offer several benefits to an organisation, including scalability and flexibility, disaster recovery, application development, and control over "shadow IT" services. It means, organisations can reap the benefits of cloud native platforms regardless of where the infrastructure or applications reside.

Recently, you may have seen an announcement between HPE and Google. HPE collaborates with businesses to provide solutions that ease the adoption of multi-cloud environments. The most recent collaboration is with Google on their Anthos solution. This combined solution is aimed at helping organisations build, deploy and optimise applications using Kubernetes and VMs.

Google Cloud's Anthos

Anthos is Google Cloud's latest open platform that allows businesses to run their apps anywhere in a way that is flexible and secure. Anthos is an innovative application management platform that offers a unified experience for application development and operations in both cloud and on-premise environments.

Historically, corporate IT had a reputation for being cumbersome, expensive, and rigid. To address this, organisations with significant assets hosted on-premise have increasingly looked to the cloud in order to scale, build new service offerings at speed and expand their reach. Without cloud, organisations will find it difficult to adapt at the same rate as their competitors or provide the hyper-individualised offerings that are beginning to be expected from potential customers and which can accelerate both local and global business growth.

Whilst we can identify numerous reasons why organisations will benefit from cloud adoption, we can also recognise reasons why we sometimes we see hesitancy – data sovereignty security, vendor lock-in, skills gaps and existing infrastructure investments. The combined efforts of HPE and Google can address some of these.

Anthos enables businesses to manage workloads running on clouds such as AWS and Azure in addition to workloads running on-premise or in Google Cloud. This enables businesses to deploy, run, and manage their applications on the cloud of their choice without requiring administrators and developers to learn new environments and APIs.

Hybrid and multi-cloud environments call for an efficient solution and the Anthos platform meets that need. The platform allows organisations to modernise their legacy applications based on virtual machines and deploy cloud-native applications in containers. It provides a uniform development and operations experience across deployments, reduces operational overheads, and boosts developer productivity.

HPE Greenlake for Anthos: The best of both worlds

HPE and Google Cloud have collaborated to offer a consumption-based hybrid solution for deploying Anthos and other Google Cloud Platform Services.

This enterprise-grade container management solution combines:

• The usability, agility, and cloud economics of Google's container hosting and management platform, with
• The security, agility, economics, performance, and control of HPE GreenLake on-premise consumption services and validated infrastructure.

By deploying and integrating hardware, software, and services to create a cloud-like environment, HPE GreenLake can offer an on-premise solution powered by Anthos. HPE GreenLake for Anthos offers a service-oriented architecture which offers the numerous advantages of container technologies.

Anthos' cluster lifecycle capabilities and HPE GreenLake's active capacity management enable businesses to begin with the scope they require and expand their infrastructure in tandem with the demands of their applications.

As HPE Greenlake runs on a pay-per-use basis, users only pay for and use the capacity they require. HPE simultaneously monitors usage and delivers capacity on demand, avoiding the risk of overspending on IT infrastructure.

HPE offers Anthos on three separate infrastructure solutions: HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, and HPE Synergy composable infrastructure.

Customers who want to develop and manage their own environments may deploy HPE's Anthos Reference Architectures on premise. As each solution provides hybrid development and testing environments, businesses may create and deploy their software anywhere, including the public cloud and on-premise.

Benefits and use cases

Whether engaging with real-time analytics, database platform operation, or app and data security, businesses should be able to generate the required results when they're needed and pay only for what they use.

Security and control remain top priorities for many workloads, driving demand for an on-premise solution that delivers the same flexibility and cost advantages as the cloud.

Google can now provide its clients with an on-premise cloud experience through HPE GreenLake. Customers of on-premise solutions have stringent requirements for the residency, security, and privacy of their data. The Google Cloud stack is effectively merged with GreenLake under the terms of the agreement to deliver an on-premise equivalent of the Google public cloud.

HPE assists businesses in their transition to a containerised environment based on Google Cloud's Anthos by providing the necessary technology, economics, and service experience. Organisations can optimise the Anthos solution for their environment by using the extensive array of technology platforms offered by HPE GreenLake.

Organisations can have an end-to-end, as-a-service experience with HPE Greenlake and Anthos and unified administration across on-premise and Google Cloud environments. An optimised Kubernetes container stack can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud to provide businesses with several benefits, including a shorter time to market, a reduction in administrative overhead, and application modernisation. The integrated solution is one use case for hybrid disaster recovery, which safeguards applications located both on-premise and in the cloud.

Conclusion

HPE GreenLake for Anthos integrates design, installation, consumption, and maintenance, allowing businesses to focus on achieving value from the hybrid and multi-cloud environment. Businesses may benefit from the advantages of an Anthos solution whilst reaping the benefits of cloud economics owing to HPE GreenLake's pay-per-use approach.

HPE and Google Cloud aim to provide a hybrid cloud solution that supports both stateless and stateful applications, facilitates data mobility, and allows users to choose how these services are consumed. Customers can create, distribute, and manage modern apps anywhere, including on-premise and multi-cloud settings, without being bound to a single provider.

We, your IT partner, can help you explore how your business could benefit from the dual capabilities of Greenlake and Google Anthos.