Google Cloud Cross-Cloud Interconnect Application Awareness

Presenting a first for the industry: Cloud Interconnect application awareness

Multicloud architectures are spreading as more business-critical software moves to the cloud. Last year, Google Cloud launched the Cross-Cloud Network to simplify and reinvent hybrid and multicloud connectivity and let organizations construct scattered applications. Organizations have embraced Cross-Cloud Networks to minimize total cost of ownership (TCO) and operational complexity as they modernize their infrastructure by utilizing AI/ML and other managed services.

The need to provide improved application experiences with guaranteed SLAs and to guarantee cost predictability for precise budgeting and risk reduction is growing. It is presenting new Cross-Cloud Network advancements today that allow your distributed apps have the greatest network experience possible while also addressing these changing demands. Among these recent developments are:

• Setting industry-first traffic priorities: Cloud Interconnect application awareness
• Reducing TCO for Cloud Interconnect while maintaining consistent pricing
• Using VPC Flow Logs to Unify Observability for Cloud Interconnect
• Additional developments that improve service networking through additional producers and programmability

Setting industry-first traffic priorities: Cloud Interconnect application awareness

Strong, high-bandwidth, SLA-backed access to Google Cloud is made possible via Cloud Interconnect. It makes dedicated and private connectivity between Google and another cloud provider possible with Cross-Cloud Interconnect. They serve as the cornerstone for developing distributed hybrid and multicloud applications.

Historically, customers have not been able to prioritize traffic over Cloud Interconnect, which has forced them to either significantly overprovision bandwidth or risk poor performance during peak congestion. This may lead to higher expenses, wasteful use of resources, and possible interruptions to company operations.

It is implementing application awareness on Cloud Interconnect in preview to fulfill this requirement for traffic priority. The managed traffic differentiation solution that Google Cloud, the first significant cloud service provider, offers enables you to overcome the crucial problem of traffic prioritizing over Cloud Interconnect. Flexibility with two policies strict priority across traffic classes and bandwidth share per traffic class is made possible by application awareness.

Cloud Interconnect’s application awareness offers several business advantages, such as:

• Prioritizing business-critical traffic makes guarantee that, when there is congestion on Cloud Interconnect connections, lower-priority traffic leaving Google Cloud doesn’t negatively affect higher-priority traffic.
• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): When combined with appropriate capacity planning, this allows for the effective use of Cloud Interconnect bandwidth and prevents unnecessary overprovisioning of links.
• With a Google-managed solution supported by the Cloud Interconnect SLA, this fully managed, SLA-backed solution offers peace of mind. compares favorably to costly, self-managed alternatives, such as network appliances, which increase operational costs, manual overhead, and complexity.

Reducing TCO for Cloud Interconnect while maintaining consistent pricing

Organizations value predictable data transmission costs when making the move to the cloud. Estimating the expenses of data transfers between hybrid and multicloud settings can be difficult for customers who are just beginning their cloud adoption journey or who are adopting distributed apps across many environments. This unpredictability is exacerbated by variable pricing that are based on metered use.

Google Cloud is presenting a dedicated interconnect and cross-cloud interconnect fixed-cost solution. Customers who choose fixed pricing remove billing variability related to data transfer by paying a set hourly rate per port instead of based on the volume of traffic transferred. Organizations can more easily utilize chargeback and/or showback to increase operational efficiency when monthly expenditures are predictable.

Using VPC Flow Logs to Unify Observability for Cloud Interconnect

Within Google Cloud, VPC Flow Logs offer flow-level insight into network traffic. VPC Flow Logs, which capture packets transmitted and received by virtual machines, let you to examine network traffic for network forensics, security and compliance, cost optimization, and performance monitoring and troubleshooting.

It has extended the coverage of VPC Flow Logs to include network traffic visibility over Dedicated Interconnect, Partner Interconnect, Cross-Cloud Interconnect, and Cloud VPN to deliver a reliable and user-friendly observability experience. The same 5-tuple (source IP, destination IP, source port, destination port, and protocol) granularity that you get for traffic within Google Cloud is now available for flow log generation for subnets, VLAN attachments, and VPN tunnels. All traffic between your subnets and your on-premises and/or cross-cloud environments will also be annotated with the appropriate hybrid connection metadata if you have already enabled VPC Flow Logs on your subnets.

In addition to offering continuous insights into traffic patterns, bandwidth usage, and traffic class performance, VPC Flow Logs facilitate the identification of particular traffic categories for prioritizing while setting up or optimizing application awareness policies on Cloud Interconnect.

Without writing complicated SQL queries, you can quickly discover and visualize your network traffic flows, including top talkers, using Flow Analyzer, which is accessible to all VPC Flow Logs customers. Additionally, you can integrate and analyze all VPC Flow Logs with services from Google Cloud services like Cloud Logging and BigQuery, or with services from your preferred observability partner.

You can preview both the Flow Analyzer and the VPC Flow Logs for hybrid connectivity.

Using new producers and programmability to improve service networking

Enabling DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps teams to deliver apps effectively without opening tickets with other teams is a fundamental principle of Cross-Cloud Network. Integration of best-of-breed services, whether SaaS, third-party, or customer-managed, across environments can be operationally challenging, and applications frequently require specialized and customized capabilities for security, monitoring, logging, and other areas that are not accessible out-of-the-box.

Presenting Cloud Load Balancing Service Extensions plugins

Google Cloud is presenting the preview of the Service Extensions plugins for Application Load Balancers, which allow you to use WebAssembly (Wasm) to add rich customizations to the networking request/response. You can add SaaS solutions or even your own changes to a workload’s datapath by using Service Extensions, which offer an open programmable data plane.

A vast array of use cases are made possible by Service Extension plugins for load balancers, including audit logging for compliance use cases, optimizing traffic to your backend by rewriting http headers or URLs, safeguarding your applications with custom logic, and more. For many of these activities, it also made a large collection of sample plugins available here.

Adding more producers to Private Service Connect to speed up the service-centric journey

Private Service Connect makes it simple to establish secure, private connections from your VPCs to Google, your own services, or a wide range of third-party partner services as you update your apps with managed services.