Dedicated Interconnect provides direct physical connections between your on-premises network and Google's network. Dedicated Interconnect enables you to transfer large amounts of data between networks, which can be more cost-effective than purchasing additional bandwidth over the public internet.
Before you use Dedicated Interconnect
Ensure that you meet the following requirements:
- Be familiar with basic network interconnections so that you can order and configure circuits.
- Be familiar with Cloud Interconnect terminology.
- Your network must physically meet Google's network in a colocation facility. You must provide your own routing equipment. Your on-premises router is typically located in the colocation facility. However, you can also extend your connection to a router outside of the colocation facility.
In the colocation facility, your network devices must support the following technical requirements:
10-Gbps circuits, single mode fiber, 10GBASE-LR (1310 nm), or 100-Gbps circuits, single mode fiber, 100GBASE-LR4
IPv4 link local addressing
LACP, even if you're using a single circuit
EBGP-4 with multi-hop
802.1Q VLANs
How does Dedicated Interconnect work?
For Dedicated Interconnect, you provision a Dedicated Interconnect connection between the Google network and your own network.
For a basic setup, a Dedicated Interconnect connection is provisioned between the partner network and the on-premises router in a common colocation facility. Your setup might be different if your on-premises router is not in the same colocation facility as your Dedicated Interconnect demarcation.
When you create a VLAN attachment, you associate it with a Cloud Router. This Cloud Router creates a BGP session for the VLAN attachment and its corresponding on-premises peer router. The Cloud Router receives the routes that your on-premises router advertises. These routes are added as custom dynamic routes in your VPC network. The Cloud Router also advertises routes for Trusted Cloud resources to the on-premises peer router.
VLAN attachment MTU options
VLAN attachments can have a maximum transmission unit (MTU) of 1440, 1460, 1500 or 8896 bytes.
The following limitations apply:
VLAN attachments with an MTU of 8896 (also known as jumbo frames) are supported only on unencrypted IPv4 and IPv6 VLAN attachments.
Requests to Google API Client Libraries automatically use 1440 MTU packets, even if your VLAN attachment is set to a higher MTU value, including jumbo frames.
We recommend that you use the same MTU for all VLAN attachments that are connected to the same VPC network, and that you set the MTU of the VPC networks to the same value. For more information about Cloud Interconnect MTUs, see Cloud Interconnect MTU.
Provisioning
To create and configure a Dedicated Interconnect connection, you start by deciding where you want a Dedicated Interconnect connection and whether you want MACsec for Cloud Interconnect. Then, you order a Dedicated Interconnect connection so that Google can allocate the necessary resources and send you a Letter of Authorization and Connecting Facility Assignment (LOA-CFA). After you receive the LOA-CFA, you need to submit it to your vendor so that they can provision the connections between Google's network and your network.
You then need to configure and test the connections with Google before you can use them. After they're ready, you can create VLAN attachments to allocate a VLAN on the connection.
For detailed steps to provision a Dedicated Interconnect connection, see the Provisioning overview.
Cloud Interconnect groups
You can use connection groups to communicate your intended level of reliability, and to receive feedback on how your Cloud Interconnect resources meet that intended level of reliability. There are two types of Cloud Interconnect resource groups:
- Interconnect groups. Use these to group your Cloud Interconnect connections.
- Attachment groups. Use these to group your VLAN attachments.
When you group your Cloud Interconnect connections and VLAN attachments, you receive information about the group's structure, global routing requirements, operational status, SLA eligibility and blockers. Use these groups to establish that your deployment meets the requirements for your chosen level of reliability. You can use Cloud Interconnect connection groups without configuring VLAN attachment groups, and you can use VLAN attachment groups without configuring Cloud Interconnect connection groups.
You can add a Cloud Interconnect connection to more than one Cloud Interconnect connection group. The connection group must be in the same project as the resources in the group.
You can't add a VLAN attachment to more than one VLAN attachment group. In addition, all of the VLAN attachments in an attachment group must be configured for the same VPC network.
To configure Cloud Interconnect groups, see Create a Dedicated Interconnect connection group.
Balance egress traffic with redundant connections
When you have a redundant topology similar to the 99.99% configuration, there are multiple paths for traffic to traverse from the VPC network to your on-premises network.
Trusted Cloud uses ECMP to balance the egress traffic across connections. To use ECMP, the Cloud Routers used by the VLAN attachments must receive the same announcement with equal cost (the same CIDR range and the same MED values).
Trusted Cloud balances the traffic between the VLAN attachments based upon the configured capacity of each VLAN attachment.
Create redundant connections with sufficient capacity
The Best practices document describes best practices for creating redundant Cloud Interconnect connections that have sufficient capacity in a failover scenario. Following these practices helps ensure that events such as planned maintenance or hardware failures don't cause loss of connectivity.
Dedicated Interconnect availability
A Dedicated Interconnect connection is considered available if
you can send and receive ICMP packets (ping) between a VM in a specific
Trusted Cloud region and a correctly configured machine in your
on-premises network. You should be able to send and receive packets through at
least one of your redundant connections.
IPv6 support
Dedicated Interconnect supports IPv6 traffic.
To support IPv6 traffic in a Dedicated Interconnect, do the following:
Configure your VPC networks to use either IPv4 and IPv6 (dual stack) or IPv6-only subnets.
Assign subnets within internal IPv6 ranges.
Configure IPv6 addresses for VMs and instance templates within the subnet.
For more information about configuring IPv6 within a subnet, see the following:
To create a custom mode VPC network with internal IPv6 addresses, see Create a custom mode VPC network with a dual-stack subnet.
To create a dual-stack subnet, see Add a dual-stack subnet.
To enable IPv6 in an existing IPv4-only subnet, see Change an IPv4-only subnet to dual stack.
To add an IPv6-only subnet, see Add an IPv6-only subnet
To create or enable VMs with IPv6, see Configure IPv6 for instances and instance templates.
For information about using internal IPv6 ranges in your VPC network and subnets, see Internal IPv6 specifications.
After configuring IPv6 in your VPC network, subnets, and VMs, configure your VLAN attachments.
Stack types and BGP sessions
With Dedicated Interconnect, you can choose between two different stack types for your VLAN attachment.
- Single stack (IPv4 only)
- Dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6)
The stack type that you select for your VLAN attachment determines what version of IP traffic is supported by your Dedicated Interconnect connection.
When you create the BGP sessions for a dual-stack VLAN attachment, you have the following options for IPv6 route exchange:
- You can create an IPv6 BGP session
- You can create an IPv4 BGP session that exchanges IPv6 routes by using multiprotocol BGP (MP-BGP).
The following table summarizes the types of BGP sessions allowed for each Dedicated Interconnect VLAN attachment.
| Stack type | Supported BGP sessions |
|---|---|
| IPv4 only | IPv4 BGP |
| IPv4 and IPv6 |
|
For more information about BGP sessions, see Establish BGP sessions in the Cloud Router documentation.
Single-stack IPv4-only VLAN attachments
By default, a Dedicated Interconnect VLAN attachment is assigned the IPv4-only stack type.
An IPv4-only VLAN attachment can support only IPv4 traffic.
Use the following procedure to create an IPv4-only Dedicated Interconnect VLAN attachment and an IPv4 BGP session.
Dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 VLAN attachments
A Dedicated Interconnect VLAN attachment that is configured with the dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) stack type can support both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.
For a dual-stack VLAN attachment, you can configure your Cloud Router with an IPv4 BGP session, an IPv6 BGP session, or both. If you configure only one BGP session, you can enable MP-BGP to allow that session to exchange both IPv4 and IPv6 routes. If you create an IPv4 BGP session and an IPv6 BGP session, you can't enable MP-BGP on either session.
Use the following procedure to create a dual-stack Dedicated Interconnect VLAN attachment and all supported BGP sessions.
You can also change the stack type of your VLAN attachment after you create the attachment. For more information, see Modify VLAN attachment.
Restrict Dedicated Interconnect usage
By default, any VPC network can use Cloud Interconnect. To control which VPC networks can use Cloud Interconnect, you can set an organization policy. For more information, see Restrict Cloud Interconnect usage.What's next?
- To find answers to common questions about Cloud Interconnect architecture and features, see the Cloud Interconnect FAQ.
- To find out more about Cloud Interconnect, see the Cloud Interconnect overview.
- To learn about best practices when planning for and configuring Cloud Interconnect, see Best practices.
- To find Trusted Cloud by S3NS resource names, see the Cloud Interconnect APIs.