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Cloud Foundry vs Google Anthos
March 15, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
9★
Open Source Cloud Application Platform that makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances.
8★
Anthos is an open application modernization platform that enables you to modernize your existing applications, build new ones, and run them anywhere. Built on open source technologies pioneered by Google—including Kubernetes, Istio, and Knative—Anthos enables consistency between on-premises and cloud environments.
Cloud Foundry and Google Anthos are, in many ways, like two highly intelligent life forms that evolved separately but somehow ended up solving the same problem: making cloud computing slightly less of an eldritch horror for developers. Both allow you to deploy applications across multiple clouds, both deal with containers like an overworked baggage handler at a major airport and both promise automation that will, in theory, do away with all the tedious bits of infrastructure management. They also have a remarkable ability to make developers feel powerful and then immediately confused—usually in that order.
Cloud Foundry, being the older of the two (born in 2011 when cloud computing was still a slightly worrying concept), took the rather noble approach of making developers’ lives easier by handling all the fiddly bits for them. It decided that developers should not have to care about infrastructure, configuration or anything even remotely resembling responsibility. With its Buildpacks and rigidly structured approach, it became the perfect solution for people who wanted to deploy things quickly without asking too many questions. Of course, the trade-off was that if you wanted to do anything weird or overly specific, Cloud Foundry would glare at you disapprovingly like a strict schoolteacher and refuse to cooperate.
Google Anthos, on the other hand, arrived in 2019, looked at Cloud Foundry and said, “That’s adorable,” before setting out to be far more ambitious. It embraced Kubernetes like a long-lost sibling, offered service meshes, security features and the ability to run anywhere—even outside Google Cloud, which for a Google product is a bit like a cat willingly stepping into a bathtub. It’s designed for enterprises that have spent years building on-premises infrastructure but now want to act like they’ve been cloud-native all along. More powerful, more flexible, but also a bit more of a headache, Anthos is the kind of tool that makes CIOs excited and engineers reach for the nearest bottle of aspirin.
See also: Top 10 Private Cloud platforms
Cloud Foundry, being the older of the two (born in 2011 when cloud computing was still a slightly worrying concept), took the rather noble approach of making developers’ lives easier by handling all the fiddly bits for them. It decided that developers should not have to care about infrastructure, configuration or anything even remotely resembling responsibility. With its Buildpacks and rigidly structured approach, it became the perfect solution for people who wanted to deploy things quickly without asking too many questions. Of course, the trade-off was that if you wanted to do anything weird or overly specific, Cloud Foundry would glare at you disapprovingly like a strict schoolteacher and refuse to cooperate.
Google Anthos, on the other hand, arrived in 2019, looked at Cloud Foundry and said, “That’s adorable,” before setting out to be far more ambitious. It embraced Kubernetes like a long-lost sibling, offered service meshes, security features and the ability to run anywhere—even outside Google Cloud, which for a Google product is a bit like a cat willingly stepping into a bathtub. It’s designed for enterprises that have spent years building on-premises infrastructure but now want to act like they’ve been cloud-native all along. More powerful, more flexible, but also a bit more of a headache, Anthos is the kind of tool that makes CIOs excited and engineers reach for the nearest bottle of aspirin.
See also: Top 10 Private Cloud platforms
