21 Anthos on bare metal
by Giovanni Galloro
This chapter covers
- An introduction to Anthos on bare metal
- Deployment options
- Networking architecture
- Storage architecture
- Installing and configuring Anthos on bare metal
The original release of Anthos required you to deploy your clusters on a vSphere infrastructure. There were no options to deploy on a different hypervisor or to physical servers. For the initial release, this made sense since vSphere is used by numerous enterprises and it allowed businesses to leverage their existing infrastructure and skill sets.
As the use-cases for containers and Kubernetes grew, it became clear that organizations wanted, and needed, more flexible deployment options.
To address these additional use-cases, Google expanded Anthos to include a bare metal deployment model. One point to highlight is that you do not have to deploy Anthos on bare metal to actual physical servers. The bare metal model allows you to deploy to any supported operating system, regardless of being a physical server, or virtual machine - even VM’s running on Hyper-V or KVM.
You can think of the bare metal option as more of a “bring your own Linux” deployment model. Rather than having an appliance to deploy your nodes, like the vSphere deployment model, you need to provide ready to use servers before you can deploy Anthos on bare metal.
Now, let’s introduce you to Anthos on bare metal.