We’re making several important announcements today: the general availability of HTTPS Load Balancing, and sustained performance gains from our software-defined network virtualization stack Andromeda, from which customers gain immediate benefits. We’re also introducing Cloud Router and Subnetworks, which together enable fine-grained network management and control demanded by our leading enterprise customers.
In line with our belief that speed is a feature, we’re also extremely pleased to welcome Akamai into our CDN Interconnect program. Origin traffic from Google egressing out to select Akamai CDN locations will take a private route on Google’s edge network, helping to reduce latency and egress costs for our joint customers. Akamai’s peering with Google at a growing number of points-of-presence across Google’s extensive global networking footprint enables us to deliver to our customers the responsiveness they expect from Google’s services.
General Availability of HTTPS Load Balancing. Google’s private fiber network connects our data centers where your applications run to one of more than 70 global network points of presence. HTTPS Load Balancing deployed at these key points across the globe dramatically reduces latency and increases availability for your customers – critically important to achieving the responsiveness users expect from today’s most demanding web and mobile apps. For full details, see the documentation.
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| Figure 1 Our global load balancing location |
Andromeda. Over the past year, we’ve written about our innovations made in Google’s data centers and networking to serve world-class services like Search, YouTube, Maps and Drive. The Cloud Platform team ensures that the benefits from these gains are passed onto customers with no additional effort on their part. Andromeda, Google’s software-defined network virtualization stack, quantifies some of these gains – especially around performance. The chart below shows network throughput gains in Gbits/sec: in a little over a year, throughput has doubled for both single-stream and 200-stream benchmarks.
Subnetworks. Subnetworks allow you to segment IP space into regional prefixes. As a result, you gain fine-grained control over the full logical range in your private IP space, avoiding the need to create multiple networks, and providing full flexibility to create your desired topology.
Additionally, if you’re a VPN customer, you’ll see immediate enhancement as subnetworks allow you to configure your VPN gateway with different destination IP ranges per-region in the same network. In addition to providing more control over VPN routes, regional targeting affords lower latency compared to a single IP range spanning across all regions. Get started with subnetworks here.
Cloud Router. With Cloud Router, your enterprise-grade VPN to Google gets dynamic routing. Network topology changes on either end propagate automatically using BGP, eliminating the need to configure static routes or restart VPN tunnels. You get seamless connectivity with no traffic disruption. Learn more here.
Akamai and CDN Interconnect. Cloud Platform traffic egressing out to select Akamai CDN locations travel over direct peering links and are priced based on Google Cloud Interconnect fares. More information on using Akamai as a CDN Interconnect provider can be found here.
We’ll continue to invest and innovate in our networking capabilities, and pass the benefits of Google’s major networking enhancements to Cloud Platform customers. We always appreciate feedback and would love to learn how we can support your mission-critical workloads. Contact the Cloud Networking team to get started!
– Posted by Morgan Dollard, Cloud Networking Product Management Lead