Google updated its Anthos hybrid-cloud platform with a new service mesh and Cloud Run serverless capabilities that flesh out the Anthos promise from when it was first announced earlier this year. The move is also the latest by Google to bolster its cloud services as it battles market heavyweights Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Anthos is a Kubernetes-based platform that is fully managed by Google and allows users to manage their data and applications in an on-premises environment or across cloud platforms from rivals like AWS and Microsoft. It was initially announced at Google’s Cloud Next event in 2018 — when it was labeled Cloud Services Platform — and formally launched at this year’s event in April.

“If you are using multiple cloud environments, Anthos is the choice for you,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the opening keynote at Google Cloud Next.

The Anthos Service Mesh is built on the Istio service mesh APIs. It provides users with uniform policies for enforcing security, including encryption in transit, mutual authentication, and access controls. And it does this through a single administrative interface.

This follows the overall service mesh formula of providing an abstraction layer to support a uniform way to connect, secure, monitor, and manage a large number of microservices running in containerized environments. It also allows users to more deeply tie their application work and management into the Anthos platform.

“Anthos Service Mesh gives you deep visibility into your application traffic, thereby improving your development experience and making it easier to troubleshoot these complex environments,” wrote Jennifer Lin, director of product management, and Pali Bhat. VP of product and design, at Google Cloud in a blog post.

The platform’s reliance on Istio isn’t a surprise as Google was one of the initial developers of the platform and has driven the platform into many of its cloud services. Istio recently hit its 1.3 release that included a focus on easing the use of the service mesh, which has become one of its bigger adoption hurdles.

For serverless, Google launched a beta version of its Cloud Run for Anthos service. This platform is based on the Kubernetes-based Knative runtime environment and allow users to more easily run stateless workloads on a fully managed Anthos environment.

Google explained that it “enforces best practices and provides deep integration with Anthos by offering advanced networking support, and enabling cloud accelerators, which means your workloads can all run in the same cluster.”

Like other serverless platforms, Cloud Run allows users to run their application in a cloud environment without having to manage those cloud resources. A user is only charged for that access when the application needs those resources and can dial itself back down to zero when those resources are not needed.

It does allow users to run those applications in either Google’s Cloud or on-premises. But like other cloud vendor-based serverless platforms like AWS Lambda and Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Functions, Cloud Run for Anthos is limited to Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP).

And, similar to Istio, Google was also a lead developer of Knative and has continued to drive that platform into its cloud operations. The Knative ecosystem recently unveiled a 0.8 version of the product, with plans for a commercial-ready 1.0 release set for later this year.

Analysts have been bullish on Knative’s potential to become the de facto way to run serverless applications on top of Kubernetes.

“Knative will almost certainly become the standard plumbing for functions-as-a-service on Kubernetes,” wrote James Governor, analyst and co-founder at RedMonk, in a blog post shortly after the platform was announced.

Both updates continue what has been a recent trend by Google in bolstering its Anthos platform to better compete against its rivals.

The company in July launched its 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 AWS’ EC2 and Microsoft Azure into containers running in GKE.

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.”

However, the vendor’s cloud business remains a distant contender to public-cloud heavyweights AWS and Azure. A recent Gartner report put Google as the No. 4 worldwide provider of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), while a Synergy Research Group report noted Google was No. 3 in cloud infrastructure services market share during the second quarter.