Tag Archives: Anthos

Using MicroK8s with Anthos Config Management in the world of IoT

When dealing with large scale Kubernetes deployments, managing configuration and policy is often very complicated. We discussed why Kubernetes’ declarative approach to configuration as data has become the most popular choice for most users a few weeks ago. Today, we will discuss bringing this approach to your MicroK8 deployments using Anthos Config Management.
Image of Anthos Config Management + Cloud Source Repositories + MicroK8s
Anthos Config Management helps you easily create declarative security and operational policies and implement them at scale for your Kubernetes deployments across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. At a high level, you represent the desired state of your deployment as code committed to a central Git repository. Anthos Config Management will ensure the desired state is achieved and also maintained across all your registered clusters.

You can use Anthos Config Management for both your Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters as well as on Anthos attached clusters. Anthos attached clusters is a deployment option that extends Anthos’ reach into Kubernetes clusters running in other clouds as well as edge devices and the world of IoT, the Internet of Things. In this blog you will learn by experimenting with attached clusters with MicroK8s, a conformant Kubernetes platform popular in IoT and edge environments.

Consider an organization with a large number of distributed manufacturing facilities or laboratories that use MicroK8s to provide services to IoT devices. In such a deployment, Anthos can help you manage remote clusters directly from the Anthos Console rather than investing engineering resources to build out a multitude of custom tools.

Consider the diagram below.

Diagram of Anthos Config Management with MicroK8s on the Factory Floor with IoT
This diagram shows a set of “N” factory locations each with a MicroK8s cluster supporting IoT devices such as lights, sensors, or even machines. You register each of the MicroK8s clusters in an Anthos environ: a logical collection of Kubernetes clusters. When you want to deploy the application code to the MicroK8s clusters, you commit the code to the repository and Anthos Config Management takes care of the deployment across all locations. In this blog we will show you how you can quickly try this out using a MicroK8s test deployment.

We will use the following Google Cloud services:
  • Compute Engine provides an Ubuntu instance for a single-node MicroK8s cluster. Ubuntu will use cloud-init to install MicroK8s and generate shell scripts and other files to save time.
  • Cloud Source Repositories will provide the Git-based repository to which we will commit our workload.
  • Anthos Config Management will perform the deployment from the repository to the MicroK8s cluster.

Let’s start with a picture

Here’s a diagram of how these components fit together.

Diagram of how Anthos Config Management works together with MicroK8s
  • A workstation instance is created from which Terraform is used to deploy four components: (1) an IAM service account, (2) a Google Compute Engine Instance with MicroK8s using permissions provided by the service account, (3) a Kubernetes configuration repo provided by Cloud Source Repositories, and (4) a public/private key pair.
  • The GCE instance will use the service account key to register the MicroK8s cluster with an Anthos environ.
  • The public key from the public/ private key pair will be registered to the repository while the private key will be registered with the MicroK8s cluster.
  • Anthos Config Management will be configured to point to the repository and branch to poll for updates.
  • When a Kubernetes YAML document is pushed to the appropriate branch of the repository, Anthos Config Management will use the private key to connect to the repository, detect that a commit has been made against the branch, fetch the files and apply the document to the MicroK8s cluster.
Anthos Config Management enables you to deploy code from a Git repository to Kubernetes clusters that have been registered with Anthos. Google Cloud officially supports GKE, AKS, and EKS clusters, but you can use other conformant clusters such as MicroK8s in accordance with your needs. The repository below shows you how to register a single MicroK8s cluster to receive deployments. You can also scale this to larger numbers of clusters all of which can receive updates from commitments to the repository. If your organization has large numbers of IoT devices supported by Kubernetes clusters you can update all of them from the Anthos console to provide for consistent deployments across the organization regardless of the locations of the clusters, including the IoT edge. If you would like to learn more, you can build this project yourself. Please check out this Git repository and learn firsthand about how Anthos can help you manage Kubernetes deployments in the world of IoT.

By Jeff Levine, Customer Engineer – Google Cloud

Helping enterprises in India transform their businesses in the cloud

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/G3KPUrjBYGKSh6FB_bNwfQncjERxF9lW0NUUJQ9UaPYW19-vBJMMmCBW8Yl6bpLYBB3ppjbZwwqPbwswcQlR8SqAVmqU-Jp1r8V_dG00BjKtd0usHGQOJKKNyf5HlDTFwl6CzVuO Nitin Bawankule Country Director Google Cloud, India


In the last year, there’s been an upward trend in cloud adoption in India. In fact, NASSCOM finds that cloud spending in India is estimated to grow at 30% per annum to cross the US$7 billion mark by 2022.


In my conversations with customers, discussions have evolved beyond cost savings and efficiencies. While those are still very relevant reasons for adopting cloud technologies, Indian enterprises are looking to Google Cloud to help them drive digital transformation, identify new revenue generating business models, reach previously untapped consumer markets, and build customer loyalty through greater insight and personalization.


To help more enterprises in India take advantage of the cloud, today we’re kicking off our Google Cloud Summit in Mumbai and next week we take the show on the road to customers in New Delhi and Bangalore. More of a community gathering than a conference, our Cloud Summits are where conversations start, partnerships form and problems are solved; and where customers convene to learn from their peers and experts about how the cloud is transforming business. It’s also our opportunity to better understand the needs of Indian businesses, and to get inspired by our customers’ success stories. Here are a few highlights.




Tata Steel: Mining data and maximizing its power


Tata Steel is a great example of an established enterprise from a traditional industry that is modernizing and embracing cloud computing. With an ambition to be a leader in manufacturing in India and a digital-first organization by 2022, Tata Steel believes smart analytics is key to enhancing operational efficiency and gaining business advantage.

To organize data from siloed systems across the organization and make it easily accessible to all employees, Tata Steel is using Cloud Search and plans to scale it to more than one million documents and 28 disparate enterprise content sources including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SharePoint. In fact, Tata Steel is one of the first Indian enterprises to harness the power of Cloud Search to meet some of the most aggressive ingestion demands, with indexing durations reduced from weeks to seconds.


They are also leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services like Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery to build their data lake and enterprise data warehouse so they can take advantage of advanced analytics and machine learning. Managed services such as AI Platform further enable Tata Steel to manage end-to-end AI/ML workflows within the GCP console. This complements their existing on-premise reporting and analytics tools, and brings data management to the forefront of everything they do—from forecasting market demand to predictive equipment maintenance.


“Digital is not just a goal, it’s become a way of life. We are digitizing everything from the deployment of factory vehicles to improving material throughput to marketing and sales. As a result, we have petabytes of structured and unstructured data that is not only waiting to be mined, but that we can generate intelligence from to create opportunities across our multiple lines of business using GCP,” said Sarajit Jha, Chief Business Transformation & Digital Solutions at Tata Steel.


Helping L&T Financial Services reach customers in rural communities


In rural communities, quick access to financial services can make a tremendous difference to livelihoods. L&T Financial Services provides farm-equipment finance, micro loans and two-wheeler finance to consumers across rural India backed by a strong digital and analytics platform. Their digital-loan approval app, which runs on GCP, makes it significantly faster and easier for people to apply for financial assistance to purchase important things such as farming equipment and two-wheelers. It also helps rural women entrepreneurs get quicker access to funds for their businesses through micro loans.


L&T Financial found G Suite to be a far better collaborative tool to help staff work together efficiently. Employees can interact with each other in real time using Hangouts Meet, and the task of information sharing is more seamless and secure through Drive. BigQuery also helps L&T Financial Services generate behavior scorecards to track credit quality of its micro-loan customers.


“Cloud is the technology that enables us to achieve scale and reach. Today there are countless data points available about rural consumers which enable us to personalize our products to serve them better. With access to faster compute power, we can also on-board consumers more efficiently. Our rural businesses have clocked a disbursement CAGR of 60% over the past three years." said Sunil Prabhune, Chief Executive-Rural Finance, and Group Head-Digital, IT and Analytics, L&T Financial Services.


Creating conversational connections for Digitate’s customers


Digitate, a venture of TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), has integrated Dialogflow into its flagship brand ignio, an award-winning artificial intelligence platform for driving IT operations, workload operations and ERP operations for diverse enterprises. This integration is the next step in ignio’s product development journey, and will enable users to chat or talk with ignio to detect issues, triage problems, resolve them and even predict system behavior.


“ignio combines its unique self-healing AIOps capabilities for enterprise IT and business operations with Dialogflow’s AI/ML-based, easy to use, natural and rich conversational capabilities to create an unparalleled, intuitive and feature-rich experience for our customers,” says Akhilesh Tripathi, Head of Digitate.


Indian enterprises going G Suite


The base of Indian enterprises that are making the switch to G Suite to streamline their productivity and collaboration also continues to grow. Sharechat, BookMyShow, Hero MotorCorp, DB Corp and Royal Enfield are now able to move faster within their organizations, using intelligent, cloud-based apps to transform the way they work.


A hybrid and multi-cloud future in India


Customers want and deserve choice and flexibility, and openness continues to be a major differentiator for Google Cloud. Since we announced Anthos, our hybrid, multi-cloud solution at Next ‘19, customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. That’s because Anthos embraces open standards, and lets customers run their applications, unmodified, on existing on-prem hardware investments or in the public cloud.


IDC predicts that by 2023, 55% of India 500 organizations will have a multi-cloud management strategy that includes integrated tools across public and private clouds. (IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2019 Predictions  — India Implications (# AP43922319). So when we hold our flagship Cloud Summits in India in 2020, I look forward to sharing more success stories of Indian enterprises that have taken the next step in their digital transformation journey.

Posted by Nitin Bawankule, Country Director, Google Cloud, India