A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network is the foundational, isolated space for your cloud resources. To organize large environments, you can use a Shared VPC, where a central host project manages the network (like subnets and firewalls) for many other service projects. This keeps the network administration separate from application development. For connecting entire environments, a Transit VPC can act as a central hub to manage routing policies and external connections.
Connecting different networks requires specific tools and designs. VPC Network Peering allows two VPCs to communicate directly with low latency. For more complex setups, a hub-and-spoke topology uses a central hub VPC (managed by Network Connectivity Center) to connect many spoke VPCs and on-premises data centers. Secure connections to on-premises networks are made using HA VPN for encrypted tunnels or Cloud Interconnect for a dedicated physical link, with Cloud Router handling dynamic routing between them.
Cloud Load Balancing directs user traffic to healthy backend resources to optimize performance and availability. A Global External Application Load Balancer uses a single global IP address to route users to the closest regional backend, ideal for web applications. For other protocols like TCP, a Network Load Balancer provides high-performance regional load balancing. The choice depends on whether your application needs worldwide reach or operates within a single region.
Building a secure perimeter involves multiple layers of defense. Google Cloud Armor is a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that protects your applications from DDoS and other web-based attacks. Hierarchical Firewall Policies let you define and enforce security rules consistently across your entire organization's VPCs. For even deeper inspection, you can deploy Network Virtual Appliances (NVA) to analyze traffic between network zones.
Private Service Connect enables secure, private access to services. Instead of exposing a service publicly, a producer network creates a service attachment. Consumer networks then create endpoints to access that service privately, with all traffic staying within Google's network. This supports a zero trust model by limiting exposure. Similarly, Private Google Access allows resources without public IPs to reach Google APIs and services privately.
A VPC is your private, isolated network partition in Google Cloud. Shared VPC extends this by letting one host project share its network infrastructure (subnets, routes, firewalls) with many service projects, centralizing control. Careful CIDR planning for IP address ranges is crucial during design to ensure you have enough space for all your VMs, containers, and services as they grow.
GKE networking integrates directly with the underlying VPC. VPC-native clusters use Alias IP ranges, which assign a unique, routable IP address from the VPC to every Pod. This creates a flat network where Pods can communicate directly with each other and other VPC resources without complex network address translation, simplifying architecture.
Private Service Connect facilitates secure communication between different VPCs and even separate organizations. It avoids the need for VPC Network Peering by using a service model: a consumer VPC creates an endpoint to connect to a service attachment in a producer VPC. All traffic flows privately over Google's backbone network, making it scalable and secure.
For traffic entering a GKE cluster, GKE Ingress manages external HTTP(S) load balancing. Container-native load balancing uses Network Endpoint Groups (NEGs) to route traffic directly to Pod IPs instead of to node VMs, reducing latency. This allows load balancers to apply health checks and security policies directly at the container level.
Multiple tools work together to secure cloud-native environments. VPC Service Controls create a security perimeter around managed services like BigQuery to prevent data exfiltration. Cloud Interconnect and Cloud VPN provide private hybrid connections to on-premises data centers. Key security components include the Cloud Next Generation Firewall for instance-level traffic filtering, Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) for verifying user identity before granting application access, and VPC Flow Logs for monitoring and analyzing network traffic.
A VPC is your private network environment in the cloud. For enterprise-scale designs, a Shared VPC allows a host project to provide shared network infrastructure (like subnets and firewalls) to multiple service projects. This model centralizes network administration for security and policy control while letting application teams in service projects focus on their own workloads.
To link VPCs together, you can use VPC Network Peering for direct, low-latency communication between two networks. Peering is non-transitive, meaning a peered VPC cannot automatically route traffic through to another peered VPC. For connecting many networks, the Network Connectivity Center provides a managed hub-and-spoke model, simplifying the management of complex topologies.
Connecting your cloud VPC to your on-premises network is done through Cloud Interconnect for a dedicated, high-bandwidth physical connection, or HA VPN for a resilient, encrypted tunnel over the internet. Both methods use a Cloud Router to exchange dynamic routing information via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which automatically learns and updates the best network paths.
Private Service Connect offers a secure method for one VPC to access services in another VPC without full network peering. It uses a producer-consumer model where services are accessed through private endpoints. This enhances security by reducing the network's attack surface, allows teams to manage their own IP spaces independently, and simplifies connecting to managed or third-party services.
A robust architecture requires managing both traffic flow and security. Cloud Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) provides advanced threat protection with deep packet inspection for traffic between network segments. Cloud Load Balancing ensures high availability and performance by efficiently distributing user traffic across your backend resources in one or multiple regions. Proper configuration of these tools is essential for a secure and performant cloud setup.
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VPC Network Peering provides direct, low-latency communication between two VPCs but is non-transitive, meaning a peered VPC cannot automatically route traffic through to another peered VPC. The Network Connectivity Center provides a managed hub-and-spoke model to connect many spoke VPCs and on-premises data centers through a central hub VPC, simplifying the management of complex topologies.
Use Private Service Connect when you need secure, private access to a specific service in another VPC without granting full network peering access. It uses a producer-consumer model where the consumer creates an endpoint to connect to a service attachment in the producer network, reducing the attack surface and allowing teams to manage their own IP spaces independently.
A Shared VPC allows a central host project to manage the network infrastructure, such as subnets and firewalls, for many other service projects, keeping network administration separate from application development. A Transit VPC acts as a central hub to manage routing policies and external connections for connecting entire environments.
An enterprise is designing a multi-tenant microservice architecture hosted on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Several partner organizations need private, unidirectional access to specific backend services hosted in the enterprise's VPC.
The architecture must satisfy the following technical requirements:
Which architecture should the cloud architect implement?
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