Introducing The Anthos Developer Sandbox—Free With A Google Account

Your colleagues in IT operations talk about needing a platform that can run a wide variety of apps: new or existing, running on Linux or Windows, long-running or serverless, capable of rapidly scaling up and down according to demand. Anthos is Google Cloud’s answer to these requirements for hybrid and multi-cloud. With Anthos, you not only get to choose how your apps will run but also where the runtimes are located—on-prem, in Google Cloud or in another cloud provider. But that may leave you wondering, “So what does it actually look like to develop on top of Anthos?”

We’re excited to launch the Anthos Developer Sandbox, giving you an easy way to learn how to develop on Anthos. With only a few minutes of your time you can get a developer-focused overview of Anthos. Better yet, the Anthos Developer Sandbox is available at no cost, to anyone with a Google account! You don’t need to be a Google Cloud customer, you don’t need to have billing enabled, and you don’t need the help of your IT department to experience Anthos first hand—simply click the button below to get started with the guided flow and then use the Sandbox to create and iterate on your own applications.

The Anthos Developer Sandbox includes the following tools, plus a guided flow for learning how to use each of them:

• Cloud Shell Editor – A development workstation in the cloud. Announced last month and available on ide.cloud.google.com, Cloud Shell Editor makes it easy to deploy cloud-native apps from an in-browser IDE, powered by the Eclipse Theia IDE platform and including all the underlying tools you need.
• Cloud Code – A set of IDE enhancements that bring you the tools you need for modern cloud-native development like Skaffold and Minikube, and provides an idiomatic and consistent development experience.
• Cloud Build Local – A tool for running Cloud Build builds locally, without needing an active Google Cloud Platform project.

With these three components you have everything you need to iterate on, debug, and test your own applications before deploying to Anthos. Once you have finished experimenting, the Anthos Developer Sandbox cleans up all of the related resources for you. The Anthos Developer Sandbox doesn’t incur any fees as it’s wholly encapsulated in the Cloud Shell free-to-use environment.

Regardless of which runtime you choose, the Anthos Developer Sandbox guides you to perform common day-to-day development tasks with Anthos, including:

• Running an application with Cloud Code in a local development environment for Kubernetes that emulates Anthos clusters
• Using Cloud Build to run your tests locally
• Iterating on your application with live updates as you develop
• Using Buildpacks to simplify your application image creation without needing Dockerfiles
• Deploying your app to the Cloud Run Emulator, which provides a similar experience to Cloud Run for Anthos

The Anthos Developer Sandbox shows you the tools you can use to build an idiomatic developer experience on top Anthos’ container-based runtimes like GKE and Cloud Run. Although we’re focused on developer tasks with this Sandbox, operators may also be interested in Anthos capabilities such as the embedded service mesh and GitOps-style configuration management in the full platform. These capabilities are a good follow on step from the Sandbox.

After you’ve completed the Anthos Developer Sandbox guided walkthrough, you can adapt the process to deploy one of your own applications. The following tutorials will help you learn and improve your development experience with Anthos:

• Deploy to Cloud Run for Anthos on Google Cloud
• Deploying internal services using Cloud Run for Anthos on Google Cloud
• Safe rollouts with Anthos Config Management

With the Anthos Developer Sandbox, we’re excited to show off the great developer tools that we’ve created for you, and we look forward to helping you have an even more streamlined and productive developer experience. Let us know how you like the Anthos Developer Sandbox by joining the #anthos channel of our Community Slack!