Announcing general availability of Cloud NAT support for network services Standard Tier

We are excited to announce general availability of Cloud NAT support for network services Standard Tier. Standard Tier delivers traffic from Google Cloud resources to external systems by routing it over the internet. Premier and Standard are network service tiers that let you optimize connectivity between systems on the internet and your Google Cloud instances. Premium Tier delivers traffic on Google's premium backbone, while Standard Tier uses regular ISP networks. With Cloud NAT support for Standard Tier, you can now get the benefits of Cloud NAT with the cost savings from the Standard Tier.

Cloud NAT is a powerful tool that enables your Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) workloads with private IPs to access internet resources in a scalable and secure manner, by using public IPs. 

Here are some of the benefits of using Cloud NAT:

• Cloud-managed service applies to each workload.

• Simplified deployment and ongoing operation with no additional networking, forwarding, or routing configuration required.

• Easy to manage regional NAT gateways with NAT rules.

• Secured workloads reduce the need for VMs to have public IP, so that connections can only be initiated by private instances to public endpoints.

• High-performance proxyless architecture enables chokepoint-free NAT operations with little impact on virtual machines (VM) throughput and latency, and scales automatically to auto-allocate additional NAT IPs for translations.

• Built-in monitoring and logging provides visibility and faster issue resolution, right from the console.

How to set up Cloud NAT for Standard Tier

Standard Tier delivers Google Cloud traffic over a transit ISP network with the latency and reliability typical of transit ISPs, with network quality comparable to that of other public clouds, at a lower price than our Premium Tier.

Cloud NAT is supported for both Premium and Standard network service tiers. Premium Tier is the default tier and you can make configuration changes as shown below to enable Standard Tier.

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Cloud NAT page.

2. Click Create cloud NAT gateway.

3. Enter a gateway name.

4. Select a VPC network for the NAT gateway.

5. Set the region for the NAT gateway.

6. Select or create a Cloud Router in the region.

7. In the Cloud NAT IP addresses list, select Auto or Manual.

8. For Network service tier, choose either Premium or Standard.

For additional configuration steps and to assign Cloud NAT external IP addresses, you can refer to our documentation here.

Next steps

To learn more, check out our Cloud NAT overview, review your Cloud NAT logging and metrics options, and take Cloud NAT for a spin in our Compute Engine and GKE tutorials.