Network service tiers

Optimize your network for performance or cost

View Documentation
Empowering customers to optimize their cloud network for performance or price
With Network Service Tiers, Google Cloud is the first major public cloud to offer a tiered cloud network.
Delivering choice with Network Service Tiers
Premium
Give users an exceptional high-performing network experience by using Google's global network.
Standard
Get control over network costs while delivering performance comparable with other cloud providers.
Category Premium Standard
Network High-performance routing Lower-performance network
Network Services Network services such as Cloud Load Balancing are global (single VIP for backends in multiple regions) Network services such as Cloud Load Balancing are regional (one VIP per region)
Service Level 99.99% availability SLA
High performance and reliability
99.9% availability SLA
Performance and availability comparable to other public cloud providers (lower than Premium)
Use Case Performance, reliability, global footprint, and user experience are your main considerations Cost is your main consideration, and you're willing to trade-off some network performance
Premium Tier

Premium Tier delivers Google Cloud traffic over Google's well-provisioned, low-latency, highly reliable global network. This network consists of an extensive global private fiber network with over 100 points of presence (POPs) across the globe. By this measure, Google's network is the largest of any public cloud provider. See the Google Cloud network map.

Google Cloud customers benefit from the global features within global load balancing, another Premium Tier feature. You not only get the management simplicity of a single anycast IPv4 or IPv6 Virtual IP (VIP), but can also expand seamlessly across regions and overflow or fail over to other regions.

Standard Tier

Our new Standard Tier delivers Google Cloud traffic over a transit ISP's network with the latency and reliability typical of transit ISPs, and with a network quality comparable to that of other public clouds, at a lower price than our Premium Tier. We also provide only regional network services in Standard Tier, such as the new regional Cloud Load Balancing service. In this tier, your load-balancing VIP is regional, similar to other public cloud offerings, and it adds management complexity compared to Premium Tier global load balancing if you require a multi-region deployment.

Performance-optimized Premium Tier

Deliver your traffic on Google's high-performance global network

Deliver the best possible application experience to your users

Performance measured by Cedexis at https://itm.cloud.com/google-reports/

Deploy global load balancing, with the management simplicity of a single anycast IPv4 or IPv6 Virtual IP across multiple regions. Seamlessly expand, overflow, or fail over into other regions.

Premium Tier supported for Cloud CDN

Lower outbound traffic costs with Standard Tier

Run cost-sensitive workloads

Performance comparable with other public cloud offerings

Performance measured by Cedexis at https://itm.cloud.com/google-reports/

Deploy regional load balancing to lower costs for single-region workloads

Choose the right tier for each workload

Full flexibility in selecting the tier for each application

Specify the tier per instance or instance template

Specify the tier per load balancer for Compute Engine and Cloud Storage backends

Enable the tier at the project level to apply it to all underlying applications (coming soon)

Network Service Tiers availability
Features Premium Tier Standard Tier
Plain VM instance Yes - Regional Yes - Regional
Application Load Balancer Yes - Global only Yes - Regional
Network Load Balancer (non-HTTP traffic) Yes - Global or regional Yes - Regional
Internal load balancers Yes - Regional VIP (+ client can be anywhere) No
Google Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine Yes Yes - Regional but only by using load balancing
Cloud CDN Yes No
Cloud VPN/Cloud Router Yes No
IPv6 Yes No

“Google’s global network is one of the strongest features for choosing Google Cloud.”

—Ravi Yeddula Sr. Director Platform Architecture & Application Development, The Home Depot