Introducing an industry first: application awareness on Cloud Interconnect

Multicloud architectures are becoming commonplace as more business-critical applications are moving to the cloud. Last year, we introduced the Cross-Cloud Network to transform and simplify hybrid and multicloud connectivity, and enable organizations to easily build distributed applications. As organizations modernize their infrastructure, leveraging AI/ML and other managed services, they have adopted Cross-Cloud Network to reduce operational complexity and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO). 

We are seeing increased demand for delivering better application experiences with guaranteed SLAs, as well as ensuring spend predictability for accurate budgeting and risk mitigation. Today, we’re excited to announce new innovations for Cross-Cloud Network that address these evolving needs and help deliver the best network experience for your distributed applications. These new innovations include:

• Prioritizing traffic with an industry first: application awareness on Cloud Interconnect
• Lowering TCO with predictable pricing for Cloud Interconnect
• Unifying observability for Cloud Interconnect with VPC Flow Logs
• Other Innovations that enhance service networking with programmability and new producers

Prioritizing traffic with an industry first: application awareness on Cloud Interconnect

Cloud Interconnect enables robust, high-bandwidth, SLA-backed connectivity to Google Cloud. With Cross-Cloud Interconnect we enable dedicated and private connectivity from Google to another cloud provider. Together, they form the foundation for building hybrid and multicloud distributed applications.  

Customers have traditionally lacked the capability to prioritize traffic over Cloud Interconnect, forcing them to substantially overprovision bandwidth or risk subpar performance during periods of congestion. This can result in increased costs, inefficient resource utilization, and potential disruption to business operations.

To address this need for traffic prioritization, we are introducing application awareness on Cloud Interconnect in preview. Google Cloud is the first major cloud service provider to offer a managed traffic differentiation solution that empowers you to solve the critical challenge of traffic prioritization over Cloud Interconnect. Application awareness enables flexibility with a choice of two policies: strict priority across traffic classes and bandwidth share per traffic class.

Application awareness on Cloud Interconnect provides multiple business benefits, including: 

• Prioritization of business critical traffic: Ensures that lower-priority traffic egressing Google Cloud does not adversely impact higher-priority traffic during congestion periods on Cloud Interconnect connections.

• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): Enables efficient utilization of Cloud Interconnect bandwidth, and avoids excessive overprovisioning of links when used with proper capacity planning. 

• Fully managed, SLA-backed solution: Provides peace of mind with a Google-managed solution backed by the Cloud Interconnect SLA. Compares favorably to expensive, self-managed workarounds including network appliances that add complexity, manual overhead, and high operational cost. 

You can learn all the details on application awareness on Cloud Interconnect in this solution brief. 

"As hybrid and multicloud architectures become commonplace, enterprises are seeking intelligent connectivity solutions to optimize data flows and application performance across their digital infrastructure. Google Cloud's application awareness on Cloud Interconnect, with its packet classification and prioritization capabilities, can optimize critical business exchanges. This will have a broad applicability across various data traffic types, providing enterprises with greater control while boosting infrastructure resiliency and cost savings." - Taranvir Singh, research manager, Cloud Networking Services, IDC

Lowering TCO with predictable pricing for Cloud Interconnect 

When migrating to the cloud, organizations value predictable data transfer costs. Customers starting their cloud adoption journey, or those embracing distributed applications across multiple environments, can struggle to estimate costs associated with data transfers between hybrid and multicloud environments. Variable prices based on metered utilization contribute to this unpredictability.

We are pleased to announce a fixed pricing option for Dedicated Interconnect and Cross-Cloud Interconnect. Customers that choose fixed pricing are charged a fixed hourly price per port rather than on the amount of traffic transferred, eliminating data transfer variability in billing. With predictable monthly costs, organizations can more easily implement showback and/or chargeback to improve operational efficiency. 

Unifying observability for Cloud Interconnect with VPC Flow Logs

VPC Flow Logs provide flow level visibility into network traffic within Google Cloud. By recording packets sent and received by virtual machines, VPC Flow Logs let you analyze network traffic not only for performance monitoring and troubleshooting, but also for network forensics, security and compliance, and cost optimization.

In order to provide a consistent and easy-to-use observability experience, we’ve expanded VPC Flow Logs coverage to include visibility into network traffic over Dedicated Interconnect, Partner Interconnect, Cross-Cloud Interconnect, and Cloud VPN. You can now generate flow logs not just for subnets, but also for your VLAN attachment and VPN tunnels, and receive the same 5-tuple (source IP, destination IP, source port, destination port, and protocol) granularity as you do for traffic within Google Cloud. If you’ve already enabled VPC Flow Logs on your subnets, all of the traffic between those subnets and your on-prem and/or cross-cloud environments will also be annotated with the corresponding hybrid connectivity metadata. 

VPC Flow Logs also make it easier to identify specific traffic types for prioritization when configuring or fine-tuning application awareness policies on Cloud Interconnect, and provide on-going insights into traffic patterns, bandwidth utilization, and traffic class performance.

Flow Analyzer is available for all VPC Flow Logs customers and allows you to easily identify and visualize your network traffic flows, including top talkers, without having to write complex SQL queries. All VPC Flow Logs can also be integrated and analyzed with services from the observability partner of your choice, or with Google Cloud services such as Cloud Logging and BigQuery. 

VPC Flow Logs for hybrid connectivity and Flow Analyzer are both available in preview.

Enhancing service networking with programmability and new producers

A key tenet of Cross-Cloud Network is to enable DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps teams to deliver applications efficiently, without having to open tickets with other teams. Applications often need specific and custom capabilities for security, monitoring, logging, and more, which are not available out-of-the-box, and it can be operationally complex to integrate best-of-breed services, whether SaaS, third-party, or customer-managed, across environments. Today, we are expanding innovations and partnerships to enhance that service-centric approach, and help drive business agility. 

Introducing Service Extensions plugins for Cloud Load Balancing

We are announcing the preview of Service Extensions plugins for Application Load Balancers, enabling you to add rich customizations to the networking request/response using WebAssembly (Wasm). Service Extensions provide an open programmable data-plane that allows you to insert SaaS solutions, or even your own customizations, into a workload’s datapath.

Service Extensions plugins for load balancers enable a wide set of use cases such as securing your applications with custom logic, optimizing traffic to your backend by rewriting http headers or URLs, custom logging to help monitor traffic, audit logging for compliance use cases, and more. We have also released a broad set of example plugins for many of these operations here.

Accelerating the service-centric journey with new producers for Private Service Connect

As you modernize your applications with managed services, Private Service Connect makes it easy to create private and secure connections from your VPCs to Google, your own services, or a large portfolio of third-party partner services.

We are announcing new data and AI producers for Private Service Connect endpoints and interfaces including: 

• Vertex AI Prediction (GA)

• Vertex AI Search (GA)

• Vertex AI Training (preview)

• Managed Service for Apache Kafka (GA)

• BigQuery for Apache Flink (preview)

• Datastream (preview)

• Cloud Composer 3 (GA)

With these new producers for AI and analytics services, now you can simplify network connectivity while applying consistent security policies to the application.

“As the leader in digital payments, PayPal is revolutionizing commerce globally in over 200 markets around the world. To best serve the hundreds of millions of customers and merchants who use PayPal services, our network must provide high reliability, security, and performance. 

PayPal leverages Private Service Connect, part of the Cross-Cloud Network solution, which connects our data analytics and AI services securely so that we can focus on delivering novel and innovative PayPal services to our customers.” - Saikrishna Kotha, Senior Director, Head of Infrastructure Platforms, PayPal

Learn more

With Cross-Cloud Network, we’re empowering you to simplify and secure your workloads, data, and users across hybrid and multicloud networks. You can learn all about Cross-Cloud Network here, and be sure to join us at the Google Cloud App Dev and Infrastructure Summit to hear more about these innovations.