Anthos Config Management

Hey everyone, I hope you all are doing well. You might have read my previous article on Anthos Service Mesh. In this article, I wanted to give you an overview of Anthos Config Management.

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Anthos Config Management Overview

Anthos Config Management is a configuration and policy management service that enables continuous protection and configuration of Google Cloud.

It consists of three components:

Policy Controller, Config Sync, and Config Controller

Benefits

Many benefits come along with Anthos Config Management since it automatically synchronize s configurations and applies policies across multiple clusters. Some of them are:

Simplified Management

Consistent configurations and policy management

Scalability across environments

Security and Compliance

Components

As mentioned earlier, 3 components work together as a single service called Anthos Config Management. They are:

Policy Controller

Policy Controller enables the enforcement of fully programmable policies that represent constraints on the desired state.

These policies will act as guardrails and will prevent configurations from violating security and compliance controls. You can also set policies to block non-compliant API requests, or to audit configurations of your clusters and report violations.

It is built on top of the open-source software project Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper and has a library of pre-built policies for common security and compliance controls. The policy controller enforces compliance with your clusters using objects called constraints.

You can also add your custom policies by creating constraint templates.

These constraint policies will define the policy parameters, error messages, and custom logic.

Config Sync

Config Sync reconciles your clusters to a set of configurations stored centrally on one or more Git repositories continuously.

These policies and configurations can be deployed to either individual or multiple Kubernetes clusters that can span hybrid or multi-cloud environments and multiple namespaces within clusters. It also helps de velopment teams manage their namespaces within clusters independently.

This Configuration as a Code approach is also known as the GitOps approach

Benefits

Some of the key benefits of Config Sync are:

Reducing the risk of shadow ops

Using GitOps best practices

Reducing downtime due to configuration-related outages

Using CI/CD pipelines

To understand Config Sync more, you need to know about namespaces, labels, and annotations as they are being used as the core parts of the implementation. To configure clusters, you need to create a config and a repository.

A config is a Kubernetes configuration declaration in YAML or JSON.

The repository is the Git repository where these configs are stored.

< h4>Config Controller

Config Controller is a hosted service to provision and orchestrate the resources on Anthos and Google Cloud.

It uses Config Connector, which maps the resources using Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) to their Google Cloud counterparts by making the necessary Google Cloud API calls. It also consists of Config Sync which connects to a Git repository to make the configuration changes easy. It also comes with Policy Controller that lets you write custom policies to enforce security and compliance.

Benefits

The benefits provided by the Config Controller are:

Simplifying management

Declaring the desired state

Consistency with GitOps

Enforcing policy guardrails

Continuous auditing

Codifying best practices

Increasing velocity

Read my article on Anthos Service Mesh

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That's a high-level overview of Anthos Config Management. I hope this helps you. Thank you for reading. See you soon!

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Anthos Config Management was originally published in Google Cloud - Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by high lighting and responding to this story.

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