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Serverless

Connect to your VPC and managed Redis from App Engine and Cloud Functions

January 6, 2020
Alina Djamankulova

Software Engineer

Matt Soldo

Product Manager GCP Serverless

Do you wish you could access resources in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with serverless applications running on App Engine or Cloud Functions? Now you can, with the new Serverless VPC Access service.

Available now, Serverless VPC access lets you access virtual machines, Cloud Memorystore Redis instances, and other VPC resources from both Cloud Functions and App Engine (standard environments), with support for Cloud Run coming soon.

How it works

App Engine and Cloud Functions services exist on a different logical network from Compute Engine, where VPCs run. Under the covers, Serverless VPC Access connectors bridge these networks. These resources are fully managed by Google Cloud, requiring no management on your part. The connectors also provide complete customer and project-level isolation for consistent bandwidth and security. 

Serverless VPC Access connectors allow you to choose a minimum and maximum bandwidth for the connection, ranging from 200–1,000 Mbps. The capacity of the connector is scaled to meet the needs of your service, up to the maximum configured (please note that you can obtain higher maximum throughput if you need by reaching out to your account representative).

While Serverless VPC Access allows connections to resources in a VPC, it does not place your App Engine service or Cloud Functions inside the VPC. You should still shield App Engine services from public internet access via firewall rules, and secure Cloud Functions via IAM. Also note that a Serverless VPC Access connector can only operate with a single VPC network; support for Shared VPCs is coming in 2020.

You can however share a single connector between multiple apps and functions, provided that they are in the same region, and that the Serverless VPC Access connectors were created in the same region as the app or function that uses them. 

Using Serverless VPC Access

You can provision and use a Serverless VPC Access connector alongside an existing VPC network by using the Cloud SDK command line. Here’s how to enable it with an existing VPC network:

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Then, for App Engine, modify the App.yaml and redeploy your application:

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To use Serverless VPC Access with Cloud Functions functions, first set the appropriate permissions then redeploy the function with the vpc- connector flag:

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Once you’ve created and configured a VPC connector for an app or function, you can access VMs and Redis instances via their private network IP address (e.g. 10.0.0.123). 

Get started

Serverless VPC Access is currently available in Iowa, South Carolina, Belgium, London, and Tokyo, with more regions in the works. To learn more about using Serverless VPC Access connectors, check out the documentation and the usage guides for Cloud Functions and App Engine.

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