Thank you. Searching for anthos and istio got me the info I needed. Istio, when finally configured, is pretty fantastic. Leveraging it for multi cloud clusters is already possible so a service that streamlines that feels like a natural step.

Terrible blog post. Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out.

> Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out.

Unfortunately not even Googlers are immune to the draw to elite signalling by drowning your copy in industry jargon without ever getting to the point.

I see this a lot on hastily-composed GitHub Readmes and "rocket-launch" startup landing pages, but it's a shame it also happens to a company whose name is globally recognized.

> the draw to elite signalling

I don't feel like that's why we all sometimes do this (though that might be an inside view and I might really be signalling along with everyone else.)

I feel like the internal thought-process that motivates this kinds of inside-baseball writing is twofold (depending on the stage of the project):

- early on: "the only people who could possibly care about something this new are people with the exact problem it solves, who stumbled onto it when jamming google full of enough keywords that there are zero other results; they already know what this does before reading; and they just want to confirm that it isn't fatally flawed. They're deploying this project in anger. (Of course they are; if they didn't desperately need it, they'd never rely on something so early in development!)"

- later on: "We're selling this to customers. We've picked a specific target market that has specific use-cases and needs, and we try to think about things the way they think about things 100% of the time, because talking to those people is what gets us money. We don't do any inbound marketing—we aren't trying to passively educate anyone outside our target market to get them interested. We're having enough trouble capturing the pre-qualified part of our funnel with in-person conversations. Converting people who haven't even fallen into the funnel yet? Who cares! They might get converted by accident if someone who already uses us takes the time to explain our product to them; but otherwise, the only time they'll hear about us is when we reach out to slowly warm them up for a million-dollar enterprise deal."

Or they don't care about what you (the engineer) thinks as long as your non-engineer manager is impressed and convinced your team needs it to grow.

When the manager asks the engineering team about their thoughts on the product, the marketers are banking on the engineers to say anything above an "ehh, it could work I guess..." so the manager makes the purchase.

I'm assuming you are a developer / engineer with what follows, but you are likely not a decision maker with purchasing authority in the type of company they are targeting with these posts. I also don't think it's in Google's interests to market this in clear engineering speak because they are after consulting dollars as well.

Being an developer myself however, yeah it's difficult to to get at the technical substance of what any of this means, as there is certainly lots of vaporware out there <cough>... <watson>... <cough>..

I hadn't considered the consulting angle. Thinking on it now, if I were in their position, I would definitely sculpt my phrasing to dazzle and amaze and convince the reader that Google's already got it figured out so just hand 'em the reins.

> Unfortunately not even Googlers are immune to the draw to elite signalling

Haha! Good one. Google practically invented elite signaling.

I'm curious how exactly are people leveraging Istio for multicloud at the moment? Is this via an advanced Istio feature or some other Kubernetes-related project?

You can use Istio for this already, where one cluster is the master: https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/share... I've never tried across cloud providers, and so I don't know if latency would be a factor, but I think in theory it could work.

You can also join clusters with Istio just for admin and network traffic, i.e. one cluster with Istio in Azure and another cluster with Istio in AWS, talking via the mesh infrastructure. https://istio.io/pt-br/docs/setup/install/multicluster/gatew...

Istio is part of the service. As far as my knowledge goes, the main components of Anthos are:

- Anthos GKE: managed Kubernetes across GCP, AWS, on-prem via VMware vSphere

- Anthos service mesh: Istio + SRE practices (Cloud Operations)

- Cloud Run: Knative serverless

- Anthos Config Mgmt: policy & security automation

- Marketplace: 3rd party applications for Anthos

Disclaimer: work for Google, but nowhere near an expert on Anthos. Just going off of some notes I took last week.

That's a pretty cool set of things, at least in theory. Wouldn't mind a project where I could try them all out!

Anthos is a multi-cloud software delivery system, i.e. it ships Google Cloud softwares to everywhere including VMware and AWS. Istio is just its traffic/proxy layer across clouds.