Reimagining virtual private clouds
At Cloud Next 17 this year, we announced our reimagining of Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), a product that used to be known as GCP Virtual Networks. Today, we thought we�d share a little more insight into what�s different about VPC and what it can do.
Virtual Private Cloud offers you a privately administered space within Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing the flexibility to scale and control how workloads connect regionally and globally. This means global connectivity across locations and regions, and the elimination of silos across projects and teams. When you connect your on-premise or remote resources to GCP, you�ll have global access to your VPCs without needing to replicate connectivity or administrative policies per region.
Here�s a little more on what that means.
- VPC is global. Unlike traditional VPCs that communicate across the public internet, requiring redundant, complex VPNs and interconnections to maintain security, a single Google Cloud VPC can span multiple regions. Single connection points to on-premise resources via VPN or Cloud Interconnect provide private access, reducing costs and configuration complexity.
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| VMs in VPC do not need VPNs to communicate between regions. Inter-region traffic is both encrypted and kept on Googles private network. |
- VPC is sharable. With a single VPC for an entire organization, you can build multi-tenant architectures and share single private network connectivity between teams and projects with a centralized security model. Your teams can use the network as plug-and-play, instead of stitching connectivity with VPNs. Shared VPC also allows teams to be isolated within projects, with separate billing and quotas, yet still maintain a shared IP space and access to commonly used services such as Interconnect or BigQuery.
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| A single network can be shared across teams and regions, all within the same administrative domain, preventing duplicate work. |
- VPC is expandable. Google Cloud VPCs let you increase the IP space of any subnets without any workload shutdown or downtime. This gives you flexibility and growth options to meet your needs. If you initially build on an IP space of /24s, for example, but need to grow this in one or multiple regions, you can do so quickly and easily without impacting your users.
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| In Google VPC, the expanded IP range is available in the new zone without rebooting the running VMs. In other VPCs this incurs downtime. |
- VPC is private. With Google VPC you get private access to Google services, such as storage, big data, analytics or machine learning, without having to give your service a public IP address. Configure your application�s front-end to receive internet requests and shield your back-end services from public endpoints, all while being able to access Google Cloud services.
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| Within Google Cloud, services are directly addressable across regions using private networks and IP addresses without crossing the best-effort public internet. |
With these enhancements, GCP is delivering alternatives for increasingly complex networks and workloads, and enhancing the abilities for organizations to create and manage spaces in the cloud that map closely to business requirements. You can learn more about Google Virtual Private Clouds at https://cloud.google.com/vpc/.
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