Intel And Google Announce Anthos Platform to Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Deployments

Intel is facing increasingly fierce competition from AMD in many facets of the CPU market today. Retailer metrics show that the AMD Ryzen consumer parts are chipping away at Intel's dominance in the consumer market. At the same time, AMD is slowly encroaching on Intel share of the server market. However, Intel has its fingers into many pies, with one of them being cloud computing. Today, Intel and Google have made a new announcement concerning acceleration of hybrid cloud architectures.

Intel says that it has long believed that cloud architectures are a foundation for data-centric computing, while underscoring that a multi-cloud foundation is required for ideal growth of a business. To that end, Google and Intel are teaming up to go after the hybrid cloud deployment market that is estimated to be worth $45 billion in 2019 and growing quickly. Intel's foundation for the architecture will be its second-generation Xeon Scalable Processors that will be available in Google Cloud instances along with an optimize Kubernete software stack and Optane DC Persistent Memory for low latency and high bandwidth throughput.

Intel will offer a reference design to developers and partners in the industry as the Intel Select Solution by mid-2019; Google and Intel's solution will be called Anthos. Anthos was previously known as the Google Cloud Services Platform when it launched last year in beta form. It will allow deployments of applications across on-premise data centers and public cloud provider services delivering increased workload portability. Two of Anthos' main competitors in this space will be Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Data center environments today are complex, and hardware and software infrastructure is not ‘one size fits all,’" said Urs Hölzle, SVP of Technical Infrastructure for Google Cloud. "Our ability to collaborate with Intel and take advantage of their technology and product innovation to deliver Anthos solutions ensures that our customers can run their applications in the way that best suits them.”

Solutions based on the Intel reference design should be available later this year. Intel notes that the new hybrid cloud infrastructure is landing at the right time as an estimated 9 million servers around the globe are approaching the end of their five-year lifespan in data centers.