Overview 

Anthos is a platform designed to help enterprises manage and secure their applications across multiple clouds and on-premises environments. In today’s landscape, organizations commonly have infrastructure spanning across different clouds (such as Google Cloud, AWS) and their own data centres. Managing these resources efficiently and securely becomes a significant challenge, especially as platforms and workloads grow more complex. Anthos aims to address these challenges by providing a unified approach to infrastructure management, container orchestration, service management, policy enforcement, and operational monitoring across diverse environments. 

What is Anthos? 

• Anthos is a modern application management platform by Google Cloud. It is designed to manage, secure, and modernize applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. With Anthos, organizations can use a consistent platform to run applications on-premises, on Google Cloud, or on other cloud providers like AWS and Azure. 

Common Challenges in Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments 

Enterprises often operate in environments where they have multiple clouds (public and private) and on-premises data centres with different infrastructure, including networking, storage, and compute resources. In these environments, organizations need to: 

• Enforce policies across their IT landscapes 

• Manage infrastructure across various platforms & Environments. 

• Integrate data into meaningful categories like business data, operational data, and alerts 

• Optimize and automate resources 

• Ensure security and compliance 

Given these complexities, platform admins, SREs, and DevOps engineers often deal with cluster-by-cluster management, making it difficult to stay current with updates, understand the broader business implications, and ensure security. 

What Makes Anthos Unique? 

1. Seamless Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Management 

• Operate and manage workloads across multiple public clouds (AWS, Azure) and on-premises environments. 

• Unified and consistent management experience regardless of infrastructure. 

2. Kubernetes at the Core 

• Built on Kubernetes, the industry-standard platform for container orchestration. 

• Supports both Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Kubernetes clusters running in other environments. 

3. Service Mesh for Microservices 

• Anthos Service Mesh integrates advanced observability, traffic management, and security for microservices. 

• Delivers features like service-level objectives, mutual TLS encryption, and dynamic routing. 

4. Configuration Management 

• Anthos Config Management centralizes governance with policy-as-code to enforce compliance across environments. 

5. Application Migration 

• Tools like Anthos Migrate simplify moving traditional workloads into containers, speeding up modernization. 

Key Benefits of Anthos 

1. Consistency Across Environments: 

• Ensures a uniform experience for developers and operators across hybrid and multi-cloud setups. 

2. Accelerated Application Development: 

• Reduces time-to-market with integrated developer tools, CI/CD pipelines, and automation. 

3. Operational Simplicity: 

• Unifies resource management through a single pane of glass, reducing operational complexity. 

4. Enhanced Security and Governance: 

• Centralized policy enforcement minimizes risks and ensures regulatory compliance. 

Detailed Features of Anthos 

1. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): Fully managed Kubernetes service offering automatic upgrades, scaling, and integrated security. 

• Supports both on-premises deployments (GKE on-prem) and cloud-based setups. 

2. Anthos Config Management (ACM): Manages configurations across multiple clusters with workflows. 

• Enforces policies as code, ensuring compliance and consistency across environments. 

3. Anthos Service Mesh: Provides service discovery, traffic management, and observability for microservices. 

• Built-in features include service-level monitoring, zero-trust security, and encrypted communication. 

4. Anthos Migrate: Automates the migration of traditional VM-based workloads to containers. 

• Reduces the complexity of modernization projects 

5.Anthos Observability: Offers tools for monitoring and logging applications. 

Real-Time Example 

Company: Retail Chain “ShopMart” 

Challenge: 

• ShopMart operates both physical stores and an online e-commerce platform. 

• They use on-premises infrastructure for store management systems and cloud-based services for the e-commerce platform. 

• ShopMart plans to adopt modern microservices architecture but wants to avoid vendor lock-in and seamlessly manage applications across on-premises and multiple clouds. 

Solution Using Anthos 

1. Centralized Kubernetes Management: 

• ShopMart uses Anthos GKE On-Prem to containerize its store management applications. 

• They also deploy e-commerce microservices on Google Cloud GKE. 

2. Consistent Configuration Across Environments: 

• With Anthos Config Management, ShopMart ensures that security policies, resource quotas, and application configurations remain consistent across on-prem and cloud environments. 

3. Traffic Management and Security: 

• By implementing Anthos Service Mesh, ShopMart secures inter-service communications and ensures smooth traffic flow during peak shopping hours, like Black Friday sales. 

4. VM to Container Migration: 

• Using Anthos Migrate, ShopMart migrates its legacy store management VMs into containers, reducing hardware dependency and improving scalability. 

5. Multi-Cloud Strategy: 

1. To ensure resilience, ShopMart deploys a part of its e-commerce platform on AWS using Anthos’ multi-cloud support. 

6. Observability: 

1. Through Anthos Observability, ShopMart monitors performance metrics, logs, and errors in a unified dashboard across all environments. 

The complete process of integrating an Azure AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) cluster with GCP’s Anthos Hub. The integration enables centralized management and monitoring of Kubernetes clusters from multiple platforms under a single Anthos interface. 

The steps covered in this guide include: 

1. Azure Prerequisites: Logging into Azure, fetching the AKS cluster credentials, and ensuring the kubeconfig file is updated with the appropriate AKS cluster details. 

2. Enabling OIDC on the AKS Cluster: Activating the OpenID Connect (OIDC) issuer URL, which is required for Workload Identity and Anthos Hub integration. 

3. Registering the AKS Cluster with GCP: Using the gcloud CLI to register the AKS cluster with GCP’s Anthos Hub by specifying the OIDC issuer URL and kubeconfig details. 

4. Verifying Kubernetes Context: Ensuring the correct kubeconfig context is selected for the AKS cluster. 

5. Creating a Service Account in GCP: Setting up a GCP service account, generating a token, and binding the account for managing the AKS cluster within Anthos Hub. 

6. Unregistering the AKS Cluster from Anthos Hub: Providing steps to unregister the AKS cluster from GCP’s Anthos fleet when required. 

Prerequisite: 

gcloud auth login 

az login 

az aks get-credentials –resource-group devops-aks-rg-1 –name devops-test-aks-cluster –overwrite-existing 

Command: 

gcloud container hub memberships register devops-test-aks-cluster –context=devops-test-aks-cluster –public-issuer-url=https://eastus.oic.prod-aks.azure.com/a3eaa001-4ee7-4f4c-ae0d-0b90d33be842/b5a8bbbb-c3f7-428c-b5fd-9f5688374ad0/ –kubeconfig=”C:\Users\Vivek Trivedi.VIVEKTRIVEDI\.kube\config”  –project=devops-internal-439011 –enable-workload-identity 

Command Details 

• –context: Name of the kubeconfig context, i.e., devops-test-aks-cluster. 

• –public-issuer-url: OIDC issuer URL from the previous step. 

• –kubeconfig: Path to the kubeconfig file. 

• –project: GCP project ID, i.e., devops-internal-439011. 

• –enable-workload-identity: Ensures Workload Identity is enabled. 

############################################### 

#### Connect Cluster using service account in gcp  

kubectl create serviceaccount -n kube-system anthos-admin 

 $TOKEN = kubectl create token anthos-admin -n kube-system  –duration=8760h 

 echo $TOKEN 

 kubectl create secret generic anthos-admin-token -n kube-system  –from-literal=token=$TOKEN 

 kubectl create clusterrolebinding anthos-admin-binding –clusterrole cluster-admin –serviceaccount kube-system:anthos-admin 

Summary 

• Purpose: Register an Azure AKS cluster with GCP’s Anthos Hub using gcloud. 

• Prerequisites: Azure login, fetching AKS credentials, enabling OIDC. 

• OIDC: Verify and enable OIDC issuer URL for the AKS cluster. 

• Registration: Use the gcloud container hub memberships register command with required parameters. 

• Verification: Ensure proper contexts using kubectl config get-contexts. 

• Service Account: Create and bind service account for Anthos connection. 

• Unregistration: Use gcloud container hub memberships unregister to disconnect the AKS cluster from GCP. 

Conclusion: 

Anthos provides a comprehensive solution for managing applications and infrastructure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, including Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments. By leveraging Anthos, organizations can ensure a consistent and unified experience for managing their workloads, optimizing resources, enforcing policies, and enhancing security. 

The integration of Azure AKS with GCP’s Anthos Hub offers a powerful way to centralize the management of Kubernetes clusters across multiple platforms. With features like Anthos Service Mesh, Config Management, and Migrate, enterprises can seamlessly manage their applications, migrate workloads to containers, and secure microservices with minimal complexity. 

The process of integrating AKS with Anthos Hub involves several steps, including enabling OIDC, registering the AKS cluster with GCP, creating service accounts, and ensuring proper configuration. This integration streamlines multi-cloud operations, improves observability, and provides centralized control over diverse infrastructures.