Anthos in 2025: Is Hybrid Still the Future, or Are We Going Full Cloud?

[a_aleinikov]

Hi all,

As we move deeper into 2025, I’d like to open a discussion on where Anthos is headed in today’s hybrid and multi-cloud world.

A few points I’d love your input on:

1. Are you still seeing strong use cases for hybrid workloads with Anthos, or are most teams shifting to full public cloud?

2. How do you balance cost and complexity when running Anthos across on-prem and cloud environments?

3. What’s your experience with Anthos Config Management and Service Mesh lately — any improvements or lessons learned?

I’m particularly curious if anyone has explored Anthos on bare metal in production and what the trade-offs look like.

Looking forward to hearing your insights.

Best,
Aleksei

[francislouie · Accepted solution]

Hi a_aleinikov,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

Anthos remains a powerful platform for hybrid and multi-cloud in 2025, especially for enterprises with data residency needs, legacy apps, or edge use cases. Industries like finance, healthcare, and retail use Anthos to manage Kubernetes clusters across Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, and on-prem, avoiding vendor lock-in.compliance.

Balancing cost and complexity are the big trade-offs with Anthos. Cost-wise, Anthos isn’t cheap. On cloud, it’s priced at $6–$8 per cluster vCPU/month (subscription vs. pay-as-you-go), but on-prem, it jumps to $24/vCPU for VMware or bare metal setups. This can add up for large clusters, especially on-prem, where you’re also footing the bill for hardware and maintenance. However, Anthos can save costs by optimizing resource utilization (e.g., containerizing VMs reduces OS overhead, AWS EC2 vs. GCP Compute Engine).

Anthos Config Management (ACM) is a standout for enforcing consistency across clusters. Its GitOps approach where configs are stored in a Git repo and automatically applied streamlines policy enforcement and reduces misconfigurations. Recent improvements include better support for multi-cluster policy automation and integration with Policy Controller for prebuilt compliance checks 

Anthos Service Mesh (ASM), built on Istio, has matured significantly. It simplifies microservices management with traffic control, observability, and security features like mTLS. Recent updates (as of 2022) include VM support, making it easier to integrate legacy apps into the mesh, and managed ASM options for less operational overhead. Google’s internal use of ASM for securing first- and third-party apps shows its production readiness. 

Both tools are improving, but they demand investment in skills and planning to maximize value.

And as for Anthos on bare metal lets you run Anthos on physical servers, deployed on an operating system provided by you, without a hypervisor layer. Anthos on bare metal comes with built-in networking, lifecycle management, diagnostics, health checks, logging, and monitoring.

Stay tuned to Google Cloud Blog to stay updated on Anthos on hybrid and multi-cloud innovations, customer stories, and new feature announcements. 

Additionally, keep an eye on Google’s Anthos documentation for the latest technical guides, release notes, and best practices with critical details on new integrations, performance optimizations, or support for emerging use cases like AI-driven workloads or edge computing.

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