Announcing higher VM- to-internet throughput for several Compute Engine families

We are excited to announce the General Availability of higher egress bandwidth for VM-to-internet traffic on the Compute Engine N2, N2D C2D and M3 families, as part of per VM Tier_1 networking performance. With this enhancement, VMs in these families that have enabled per VM Tier_1 networking performance have a higher VM-to-internet egress limit — up to 25Gbps. The default egress bandwidth limit for these VMs is up to 7 Gbps when sending traffic from a VM to the internet.

This feature enables workloads that need higher VM-to-internet throughput to operate with fewer VMs, resulting in significant cost-savings. Workloads such as multi-session WebRTC, media processing and streaming, firewall appliances and many others, can now take advantage of this feature.

Bandwidth options for N2, N2D, C2D and M3 families

You can expect the same bandwidth options for high-memory, high-cpu and custom configurations in N2, N2D, C2D, and M3 VMs as long as they meet the above vCPU requirements.

This higher VM-to-internet configuration is included as part of the per VM Tier_1 networking performance for no additional charge, and as such, does not appear as a separate line item in the Billing report besides the line item for per VM Tier_1 networking performance. For more details, please visit our pricing¹ page. 

Here’s an example using the gCloud SDK to create an N2 instance with per VM Tier_1 networking performance that enables up to 75 Gbps VM-to-VM network bandwidth and up to 25 Gbps VM-to-internet network bandwidth (documentation):

Using the TIER_1 setting on the network-performance-configs flag automatically upgrades your instance with increased network bandwidth.

Adding more value to per VM Tier_1 networking

This feature is made possible by leveraging Andromeda's unique architecture, allowing us to upgrade our SDN infrastructure to scale out the processing of Internet-bound traffic "under the hood," adding value — at no extra cost — to our 100Gbps VM-to-VM Tier_1 networking product on existing VM families.

Whether you need enhanced VM-to-VM performance or additional VM-to-internet throughput, Tier_1 networking enables you to upgrade your VMs to use increased bandwidth in any zone where you can create a supported instance.

At Google Cloud, we always strive to offer best-in-class networking features based on customer input. Please stay tuned as we bring out more improvements to our service and offerings. We would love to hear suggestions from you on improving our products and offerings.

Happy networking!

^{1. This feature is currently not available for Tier_1 networking performance on C2 families.}