Cloud Service Mesh and Traffic Director are now Cloud Service Mesh. For more information, see the Cloud Service Mesh overview.

Route traffic from Cloud Service Mesh workloads to Compute Engine VM

This page shows you how to securely route network traffic from Cloud Service Mesh workloads on GKE to Compute Engine VM fronted by a BackendService.

Note that when routing traffic from GKE to a Compute Engine VM, it is not required to have the Compute Engine VM or BackendService join the Cloud Service Mesh. However, the Compute Engine VM and BackendService must be in the same project as the Cloud Service Mesh GKE cluster. This limitation exists while this feature is available in public preview. MTLS isn't supported for Compute Engine VMs

Before you begin

The following sections assume that you have:

Alternatively, you can run the following commands to deploy a sample Compute Engine VM fronted by a BackendService.

Deploy a sample Compute Engine VM and BackendService:

gcloud compute instance-templates create td-httpd-vm-template \
  --scopes=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform \
  --tags=http-td-server \
  --image-family=debian-11 \
  --image-project=debian-cloud \
  --metadata=startup-script="#! /bin/bash
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install apache2 -y
sudo service apache2 restart
echo '<!doctype <html><body><h1>'\`$(/bin/hostname)\`'</h1></body></html>' | sudo tee /var/www/html/index.html"

gcloud compute instance-groups managed create http-td-mig-us-east1 \
  --zone=VM_ZONE   \
  --size=2 \
  --template=td-httpd-vm-template

gcloud compute health-checks create http http-helloworld-health-check

gcloud compute firewall-rules create http-vm-allow-health-checks \
  --network=default \
  --action=ALLOW \
  --direction=INGRESS \
  --source-ranges=0.0.0.0/0 \
  --target-tags=http-td-server \
  --rules=tcp:80

gcloud compute backend-services create helloworld \
  --global \
  --load-balancing-scheme=INTERNAL_SELF_MANAGED \
  --protocol=HTTP \
  --health-checks http-helloworld-health-check

gcloud compute backend-services add-backend helloworld \
  --instance-group=http-td-mig-us-east1 \
  --instance-group-zone=VM_ZONE  \
  --global

Where:

VM_ZONE is the zone where you want your Compute Engine VM to be deployed.

Configure a Compute Engine VM as a GCPBackend

In this section, you expose the Compute Engine VM to the GKE workloads using GCPBackend. The GCPBackend consists of:

Frontend information - specifically, the hostname and port that GKE Workloads would use to call this GCPBackend.
Backend information - the BackendService details such as service name, location, and project number.

The GCPBackend contains the hostname and port details as well as the BackendService details (service name, location, and project number). The GKE workloads should use the GCPBackend hostname and port in their HTTP requests to access the Compute Engine VM.

To make the hostname DNS resolvable within the cluster (by default it isn't resolvable), you must configure Google Cloud DNS to resolves all hosts under a chosen hostname to an arbitrary IP address. Until you configure this DNS entry, the request fails. The Google Cloud DNS configuration is a one-time setup per custom domain.

Create a managed-zone:

gcloud dns managed-zones create prod \
    --description="zone for gcpbackend" \
    --dns-name=gcpbackend \
    --visibility=private \
    --networks=default

In this example the DNS Name is gcpbackend and the VPC Network is default.

Set up the record to make the domain resolvable:

gcloud beta dns record-sets create *.gcpbackend \
  --ttl=3600 --type=A --zone=prod \
  --rrdatas=10.0.0.1

Create the GCPBackend with a hostname under the previous domain:

cat <<EOF > gcp-backend.yaml
apiVersion: networking.gke.io/v1
kind: GCPBackend
metadata:
  name: vm-gcp-backend
  namespace: NAMESPACE
spec:
  type: "BackendService"
  hostname: hello-world.gcpbackend
  backendservice:
    name: helloworld
    location: global
EOF
kubectl apply -f gcp-backend.yaml

In this example GCP_BACKEND_NAME is vm-gcp-backend.

Create a testing Pod to verify GKE to Compute Engine VM connectivity:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: testcurl
  namespace: default
spec:
  containers:
  - name: curl
    image: curlimages/curl
    command: ["sleep", "3000"]
EOF

kubectl exec testcurl -c curl -- curl http://hello-world.gcpbackend:80

Now, your GKE workloads may access the Compute Engine VM by sending HTTP requests to hello-world.gcpbackend:80.

You should use distinct names for GCPBackend to avoid conflicting with existing Kubernetes services or Istio Service Entries. If it does conflict, the precedence order (high to low) is Kubernetes Service, istio ServiceEntry, and GCPBackend.

Note that the Virtual Service and the GCPBackend must be in the same namespace and the Compute Engine VM must be in the same project as the Cloud Service Mesh GKE cluster.