Comparison of GCP Anthos, AWS Outpost, Azure Arc/Azure Stack and IBM OpenShift

Aug 2023 update: A lot has happend since I wrote the article and now Anthos and Openshift have surfaced to the top.

Anthos Features:

• Anthos Config Management?is a key component of Anthos that helps you manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across hybrid cloud environments. It uses features like Policy Controller, Config Sync, and Config Controller to continuously protect and configure Kubernetes resources.
• Anthos GKE?is a service that allows you to manage Kubernetes resources without the hassle of a complicated migration. It handles the containers across all environments, and it can even manage clusters regardless of platform. This makes it the closest offering to a bare-metal solution.
• Anthos Service Mesh?is a service powered by Istio that makes it easier to manage containerized applications. It provides granular control over cluster capabilities, so you can fine-tune the performance and security of your applications.
• Migrate for Anthos?makes it easy to move from VMs to containers. It is a combination of Migrate to Anthos and Anthos GKE that helps you modernize legacy applications.

OpenShift Features

• Red Hat Cluster Management for Kubernetes is a solution on Red Hat OpenShift that provides end-to-end visibility into an organization's entire Kubernetes domain. It offers multi-cluster management, policy-based governance, and application lifecycle management.
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security is a service that secures Kubernetes clusters against security vulnerabilities and risks. It provides detailed security monitoring, environment compliance scans with best practices, and automated guardrails within CI/CD workflows. This can help you reduce the time and effort needed to implement security.
• Sandbox is a solution that provides access to an OpenShift environment with a pre-configured set of developer tools. This makes it easy to create containers from source code or Docker files, so you can build cloud-native applications.

Anthos and OpenShift are both powerful platforms for managing Kubernetes clusters. However, they have different strengths and weaknesses. Anthos is a portable platform, while OpenShift is a strong purpose-built platform that offers a wider range of features. The best choice for you will depend on your specific needs and requirements.

Original article:

All three major cloud providers are going big in Hybrid cloud. The realization has dawned that they cannot have the market all to themselves, that ~70% of workloads may never move to the cloud, on-prem workloads need modernization and the cloud native optimization tools and DevOps tools can help in accelerating development with continuous everything paradigm for a COVID impacted, cut-throat cost-cutting corporate environment.

Having said that the philosophical and technological directions vary.

• AWS outpost released around Nov 2018 requires you to buy their packaged hardware with AWS cloud software stack built in. Here is a Reinvent presentation slide from AWS from forbes.com

• Azure, which was first to the game, released in July 2017, seems to take the approach of taking all Windows and Linux on-prem devices to be married to their cloud counterparts, Edge IoT devices and the multi-cloud workloads on AWS, GCP, Oracle OCI

"Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by delivering a consistent multi-cloud and on-premises management platform. Azure Arc enables you to manage your entire environment, with a single pane of glass, by projecting your existing resources into Azure Resource Manager. You can now manage virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases as if they are running in Azure. Regardless of where they live, you can use familiar Azure services and management capabilities. Azure Arc enables you to continue using traditional ITOps, while introducing DevOps practices to support new cloud native patterns in your environment".

GCP Anthos, released in April 2018, seems to take an approach to containerize everything with on-prem apps and workloads to be converted to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) containers. GKE serves as the main control center. Anthos allows companies to 'modernize in-place' and automate both policy (via policy controller) and security at scale. In additional BigQuery OMNI is a game changer where it allows for "Using standard SQL and the same BigQuery APIs our customers love, you will be able to break down data silos and gain critical business insights from a single pane of glass....BigQuery's?separates compute and storage. By decoupling these two, BigQuery provides scalable storage that can reside in Google Cloud or other public clouds, and stateless resilient compute that executes standard SQL queries." In addition microservices sequencing and automation is done with Istio, an open source service mesh. Cloud Run runs and deploys code to a container in seconds(or minutes). With Knative on K8s you can run serverless. Anthos gives an option for GCP to get a foothold in the other clouds such as AWS and Azure (coming shortly). Ever hear the saying "beat you on your turf"?

"Today, if you talk to Azure they will say you can run Azure Stack on-premise and on the cloud, Amazon will say you can run Outposts on-premise and in the AWS cloud. They are fine companies, but they're not solving the multi-cloud problem,"

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian

"From AWS perspective, Anthos is yet another workload, but for Google, it’s the most strategic platform quietly running in its competitor’s environment hosting some of its managed services and customer workloads".

"With Anthos, Google turns every AWS and Azure region into an extended region of its cloud platform. Two products - Anthos GKE and BigQuery - will eventually become available in almost all the regions of AWS and Azure tripling the count of Google Cloud regions".?

"One side of Anthos is stuck to the underlying infrastructure (vSphere, baremetal, AWS and Azure) while the other side is meant for Google’s own managed services and customer workloads".

Janakiram MSV

Oracle OCI: Oracle?Cloud at Customer brings together cloud infrastructure and platform services, such as DB, Big Data and app development, as well as SaaS applications like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human capital management (HCM), into customers' on-prem data centers. Oracle provides the hardware sitting on your premises, hence asks you to sign longer term contracts to recoup costs.

"Oracle asks customers to sign a longer-term deal - three to four years minimum - to account for the capital expenditure involved with the shipping and installing of dedicated hardware"

• Let's dive in.

None of the content in the graphic below is mine. I scoured over a 100 online free blogs, talked to customers and product folks at respective companies to arrive at the chart below. No copyright violation intended - just helping peers and education.

So which was is the best? That is not for me to say publicly due to independence considerations. Draw your own conclusions!

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