Anthos Private Mode
Lea Lonnberg-Hickling, UX Designer
Portfolio case study
Google Private Cloud (GPC)
Anthos Private Mode
Coming soon
Role: UX Designer
Timeline: Q1-2021
Launched: Q2-2021
Launch type: platform console
Designer on the founding Google Private Cloud UX team. Designed Anthos Private Mode platform, the software-only solution under the Google Private Cloud umbrella offering. APM unlocked $XXXM in customer opportunities.
Proprietary + Confidential
Anthos Private Mode UX team & partners
Lea
UX Designer
Chad
Sr. UX Researcher
Marco
Product Manager
CY
Staff Software Engineer
Marc
Engineering Manager
Gaurav
Front-End Engineering Lead
Mike
Sr. UX Designer
Table of Contents
UX opportunity
Primary user role
GA designs
Launch
5-13
14-16
17-45
46-48
UX opportunity
APM GA UX overview
Digital sovereignty
Context
Digital sovereignty refers to an organization’s ability to exercise autonomous control over data ownership, access, use and flow; and exercise control over the infrastructure used.
Google Private Cloud offering
Google Private Cloud
Hardware
Software
Google’s answer to digital sovereignty concerns.
Anthos Private Mode: the software-only solution
Google Private Cloud
Hardware
Software
Anthos Private Mode
Personae
Customers use their own on-premises hardware or data centers operated by a third party (ex. OVH)
What is Anthos Private Mode?
Anthos Private Mode (APM) represents GPC’s first phase --
a new software solution built on top of Anthos, serving customers with digital sovereignty requirements that limit their sharing of data with public cloud providers.
APM enables customers to build, deploy and monitor applications in their isolated on-premises environments, disconnected from Google.
GPC target customers
Data sovereignty
A subset of customers’ workloads need to answer sovereignty requirements, however the majority of their workloads can be operated by Google Cloud directly or as part of their Anthos Hybrid Strategy.
$XXB blocked revenue
Operational sovereignty
Customers’ workloads need to be operated independently from GCP with no data connectivity.
$XXXM enterprise + $X.XB public sector blocked revenue
Partner operated cloud
Customers’ workloads are in regions without a Google datacenter and need local isolation due to geopolitical or latency requirements.
$XXXM
UX opportunity
June 2021 launched limited GA with French cloud provider, OVH
Customers with workloads in OVH data centers are using the APM console to manage their applications.
APM is an entirely new console, separate from the Google Cloud console
Running on open source Angular Material components (code base has no connection to Google), styled to look as close as possible to Cloud components.
APM unlocks $XXXM in customer opportunities
GPC information architecture -
capabilities
Marketplace
Identity & access
Cluster Management
Config management
Service mesh
VM Management
VM instance management
VM network/storage Ops
Support
Platform observability
Infrastructure Management
HW infrastructure management
Platform Admin
Infrastructure Operator
All or some combination
Multi-tenancy
Application Management
Operate workloads
Health checks, roll outs
Application Operator
GPC UI components (MVP)
GPC information architecture -
capabilities
Marketplace
Identity & access
Cluster Management
Config management
Service mesh
VM Management
VM instance management
VM network/storage Ops
Support
Platform observability
Infrastructure Management
HW infrastructure management
Multi-tenancy
Application Management
Operate workloads
Health checks, roll outs
GPC UI components (MVP)
Anthos Private Mode GA - June 2021
Google Private Cloud GA - January 2022 (includes APM capabilities)
Primary user role
APM GA UX overview
APM’s primary user
Platform Admin
As the core target user of Anthos/GKE, platform admins are part of a centralized platform team responsible for provisioning/ creating resources for application teams and managing the organization’s central infrastructure. Platform admins are generally underserved, so designing products for this role could be a significant differentiator for GCP.
May also be called: Platform operator/admin/developer, DevOps engineer, cluster operator, cloud architect, SRE.
Platform Admin
Responsible for
Goals and motivations
GA designs
APM GA UX overview
UX process
APM GA designs
UX process
Five 90-min remote UX research sessions
Participants from OVH, Telindus, SADA Systems, Arctiq, CapGemini
Evaluated core user stories to set up the platform and get started with some day 2 operations
Usability tested end-to-end GA UX
13 design updates made based
on UXR study findings
UX process
UX writing
Information architecture overview
APM GA designs
APM console
Platform UX
designed specifically for APM to account for unique platform needs
Anthos capabilities features incorporated into APM from Anthos
Open-source tooling features that leverage open-source as a supplement to the APM UI
Platform UX designs
APM GA designs
APM console
The APM console leverages Anthos capabilities, providing users with a consistent application management experience across Google Cloud and Private Cloud.
Sign in
On day 0, first-time users will access the APM console via a one-time authentication token provided to them by Google.
Once logged in, users will set up their identity provider to use their own single sign-on to access the console.
Dashboard
The user tabs to the upgrades page…
1
2
3
Upgrades
The upgrades page gives users a single-pane-of-glass view into all the upgrades available across all their resources.
APM users do not receive rolling, automated updates the way that Cloud users do. APM users must manually download the upgrade from a separate upgrade center, then navigate here to perform the upgrade, to account for disconnected mode (no connection to Google).
1
2
Machines
In non-GA scenarios the customer may own and operate their own data center, in which case they would add a new server to one of their racks.
2
1
Access
Once the user has set up their identity provider, they can add team members to the platform by assigning roles to members authenticated by their identity provider.
Post-GA, custom roles will be supported, enabling customers to decide more specifically what roles can do and see in within the APM platform.
Support
Unlike Cloud customers, who benefit from a full Google support, APM customers will be disconnected from Google, which completely changes their support model.
The support feature offers varying levels of support customers might need.
Post-GA will include a break-the-glass scenario -- users will be able to give Google support agents access to select resources for a finite period of time to assist in critical troubleshooting scenarios.
1
2
3
Anthos capabilities
APM GA designs
APM console
The APM console leverages Anthos capabilities, providing users with a consistent application management experience across Google Cloud and Private Cloud.
Clusters
Clusters are running in the customer’s bare metal environment (meaning the clusters’ nodes are physical bare-metal servers rather than virtual machines).
1
2
Config management
Config management allows users to ensure their clusters are constantly adhering to security policies. Clusters with config management set up are constantly being monitored against the policies in the repositories they are connected to.
1
2
3
Identity
APM’s identity page is an implementation of Anthos Identity Service. Here, users can connect their identity provider to the platform, to enable single sign-on.
Post-GA will include connecting multiple identity providers.
Open- source tooling
APM GA designs
APM console
The APM console leverages open source tooling as a way of supplementing the UI, providing users with richer, more granular details about their resources.
Monitoring
Monitoring links out to dashboards in Grafana that provide critical observability information to users about the health of their platform.
Post-GA, product, eng and UX will partner to determine what components from open-source tools should be incorporated into the APM console.
Monitoring: Grafana dashboard example 1
“Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.” (source).=
Post-GA, product, eng and UX will partner to determine what components from open-source tools should be incorporated into the APM console.
Monitoring: Grafana dashboard example 2
“Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.” (source)
Post-GA, product, eng and UX will partner to determine what components from open-source tools should be incorporated into the APM console.
Service mesh
Service mesh allows users to monitor the health and performance of their microservices architecture.
1
2
3
Service mesh: Kiali interstitial dialog
An interstitial dialog provides users with feed-forward, making the transition between APM and open-source tools as seamless as possible.
Post-GA, product, eng and UX will partner to determine what components from open-source tools should be incorporated into the APM console.
Service mesh: Kiali dashboard example
“Kiali is a management console for an Istio-based service mesh. It provides dashboards, observability, and lets you operate your mesh with robust configuration and validation capabilities.
It shows the structure of your service mesh by inferring traffic topology and displays the health of your mesh.” (source)
Post-GA, product, eng and UX will partner to determine what components from open-source tools should be incorporated into the APM console.
Workloads
Users can manage all their workloads and view which clusters their workloads are deployed onto.
“Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.” (source)
1
Launch
APM GA UX overview
Launch
June 2021 launched limited GA with French cloud provider, OVH
Customers with workloads in OVH data centers are using the APM console to manage their applications.
Google Private Cloud GA launched in Q1-22
GPC (hardware and software offering) launched in January 2022.
APM unlocks $XXXM in customer opportunities
Targeting EMEA and APAC public sector agencies, regulated enterprises (manufacturing, financial sector), multinational firms that operate in regions with limited GCP coverage.
Anthos Private Mode GA Launch Impact
UX process
2021 UX timeline for APM GA
UX design
Research
Eng implementation
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
UX updates
UX implementation support
Thank you