Connecting to our cloud resources
Before learning more about the connectivity options available in Google Cloud, let’s first understand how networking works internally by introducing VPC networks.
VPC networks
Just as a Virtual Machine is the virtual version of a physical host, a VPC network is the virtual version of a traditional physical network. VPCs are directly implemented inside Google’s production network.
A VPC network provides different services and features:
- Connectivity for our VMs and GKE clusters, App Engine flexible environment instances, and other Google Cloud products built on VMs.
- Native internal TCP/UDP load balancing and proxy systems for internal HTTP(S) load balancing.
- Compatibility with Cloud VPN and Cloud Interconnect to help us connect to our on-premises networks. We will cover these two products in a minute.
- Traffic distribution from Google Cloud external load balancers to backends.
Beyond this feature list...