Google launches Migrate for Anthos, Traffic Director, and Layer 7 Internal Load Balancer

Google today made a slew of hybrid and multi-cloud announcements. The company launched Migrate for Anthos in beta, which allows you to take virtual machines from on-premises or Google Compute Engine and move them directly into containers running in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Migrate for Compute Engine, which already supports moving virtual machines out of Amazon EC2, gained beta support for migrating virtual machines directly from Microsoft Azure into Google Compute Engine. Finally, Google added options for adopting microservices and modern load balancing.

Anthos is a service based on GKE that lets you run your applications unmodified via on-premises datacenters or in the public cloud. At Google Cloud Next 2019 in April, Anthos hit general availability. Most interestingly, Google announced at the time that Anthos will run on third-party clouds, including AWS and Azure.

Now, Migrate for Anthos lets you modernize your virtual machines and move them to containers automatically. The manual processes of traditional container modernization strategies are no longer required, Google promises, “even for VMs you’d previously written off as not being able to modernize.” And once you’ve moved, there are plenty of automation benefits, like no longer having to manually maintain and patch your OS.

Traffic Director and Layer 7 Internal Load Balancer

Google today also announced the general availability of Traffic Director in Anthos and the beta release of Layer 7 Internal Load Balancer (L7 ILB). The former makes it easier to adopt microservices and the latter to use modern load balancing. Both work out-of-the-box with virtual machines (Compute Engine) and containers (Google Kubernetes Engine or self-managed).

Traffic Director is Google’s fully managed, scalable, resilient service mesh control plane that provides configuration, policy, and intelligence to Envoy or similar proxies. Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is an open source high-performance proxy that runs alongside the application to deliver platform-agnostic networking capabilities. Envoy abstracts away application networking, while Traffic Director delivers global resiliency, intelligent load balancing, and controls like traffic splitting, fault injection, and mirroring.

If you want to modernize existing applications, L7 ILB can bring load balancing features to legacy environments via a traditional load balancer. Because L7 ILB is powered by Envoy and Traffic Director, it’s also a great first step toward migrating legacy apps to service mesh.

On its Q2 2019 earnings call last week, Google said its cloud business has hit an $8 billion annual run rate. That revenue figure includes G Suite, however, and it still puts the company behind competitors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Today’s announcements are no surprise — Google is making it easier for potential customers to come into the fold.