Google Cloud today announced a version of its Anthos hybrid-cloud platform for virtual machines (VMs) that lets developers standardize on Kubernetes while running workloads that aren’t easily containerized in VMs. 

Anthos is Google’s fully managed, Kubernetes-based platform that allows users to manage their data and applications in an on-premises environment or across cloud platforms from rivals like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. Today's announcement follows past Anthos expansions for bare metal servers and hybrid-cloud environments. 

Anthos for VMs standardizes an operation model, process, and tooling. It also introduces incremental modernization efforts and supports both stateful monolithic workloads and traditional workloads.

For active VMware customers, the Anthos control plane connects to the vSphere environment and attaches vSphere VMs. This allows users to manage VM and container traffic and apply security and policies consistently across clusters.

Alternatively, developers can shift VMs to Anthos as-is using KubeVirt, which is an open-source virtualization API for Kubernetes. Developers can then build, change, and deploy applications from containers or VMs through Anthos’ single pane of glass. 

The move closes a loop on Google's launch of its Migrate for Anthos platform launched last year. That launch provided support for Anthos deployed in an on-premises environment that can convert VMs in those environments to Anthos while keeping them on premises.

Google Cloud also announced the Anthos Multi-Cloud API to simplify the process of using Anthos to manage containerized workloads running in other cloud environments. The API provides management of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters running on Azure or AWS infrastructure from within the Google Cloud Console or the command line interface (CLI). 

The cloud provider claims this API is the only one needed to manage container deployments across any major public cloud provider, streamlining the developer experience. This API will be generally available by year-end. 

Google Cloud also announced new use cases for certain Anthos services through GKE.

Anthos Config Management is now generally available as a standalone service to help GKE customers automate policy and configuration at a per-cluster cost. An Anthos Service Mesh for GKE, a hybrid service mesh compatible across both Google Cloud and on-prem cloud environments, is now also generally available.