Google remains very active in making it easier for organizations to migrate their existing and legacy workloads into a Google-managed environment, with the latest push involving cloud migration and networking tools tied to its Kubernetes-based Anthos platform.

The first is the beta launch of the Migrate for Anthos service that allows users to take a virtual machine (VM) from on-premises or Google Compute Engine (GCE) and move it directly into containers running in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Those VMs can also be migrated directly from Amazon Web Services’ (AWS’) EC2 and Microsoft Azure into containers running in GKE.

This is designed to ease the migration of legacy applications into a containerized environment, and like the move behind the initial Anthos launch, potentially migrate customers into the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) ecosystem.

The migration tool was initially unveiled alongside the Anthos launch at the Google Next event earlier this year. Anthos is a Kubernetes-based platform that is fully-managed by Google.

These migration helpers are becoming increasingly popular as vendors look to help organizations move their legacy on-premises or VM-based applications to modern architectures.

IBM last year enhanced the migration capabilities of its Cloud Migration Factory platform to include deep insight algorithms designed to improve planning accuracy and reduce migration risks by uncovering potential challenges earlier in the process. The vendor had previously joined a similar push by Docker Inc. and its Modernize Traditional Application (MTA) program.

Google also added beta support for migrating VMs out of Microsoft Azure into its GCE platform. That service already supports migration of VMs out of AWS’ EC2.

To handle traffic management of these data migration options, Google also announced general availability of its Traffic Director product and beta availability of its Layer 7 Internal Load Balancer.

Traffic Director is a fully-managed service mesh control plane that can operate within Anthos. It provides configuration, policy, and intelligence to data plane service mesh proxies like Envoy. It does this using open APIs to allow customers to work with different proxies that can abstract away application networking. The platform provides load balancing and traffic control features like traffic splitting, fault injection, and mirroring of services.

The L7 ILB product can be added to Traffic Director to make it easier for organizations to modernize their existing applications. It uses Traffic Director and Envoy to provide traffic control to legacy services in a format that is similar to traditional load balancers.

Google also teased the upcoming general availability release of its High Availability VPN and 100G Dedicated Interconnect services. The former product product connects on-premises deployments to GCP Virtual Private Cloud with a 99.99% service level agreement (SLA). The latter service provides a 100 Gb/s connection for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

Google’s cloud business remains a distant contender to public-cloud heavyweights AWS and Azure. However, Google’s management recently noted that its cloud biz reached an annual revenue run rate of more than $8 billion and plans to triple its sales force “over the next few years.”