Google released a preview of Anthos for Virtual Machines, a new capability allowing developers to standardize on Kubernetes while continuing to run some workloads that cannot be easily containerized in virtual machines.
The idea is to allow developers to standardize on Anthos as their operational model while still supporting VMs for traditional workloads like Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) or stateful monolithic workloads. Google Cloud describes this as an incremental modernization effort.
Developers can take advantage of Anthos for VMs in two ways – either by attaching vSphere VMs, or shifting VMs as-is. For customers with active VMware environments, the Anthos control plane can now connect to your vSphere environment and attach your vSphere VMs, allowing you to apply consistent security and policies across clusters, gain visibility into the health and performance of your services, and manage traffic for both VMs and containers. Alternately, Anthos for VMs allows you to shift VMs as-is onto Anthos with KubeVirt, an open-source virtualization API for Kubernetes.
"While we have seen many customers make the leap to containerization, some are not quite ready to move completely off of virtual machines (VMs). They want a unified development platform where developers can build, modify, and deploy applications residing in both containers and VMs in a common, shared environment."
