Google Cloud Router

Cloud Router Overview

Cloud Router is a distributed managed Google Service which provides dynamic routing using the standard Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

The service is used to provide the dynamic routing capability to the following connections between on-premise and Google Cloud

• Cloud VPN – Classic and High Availability
• Partner Interconnect
• Dedicated Interconnect
• Router Appliance ( a Network Connectivity Center feature that lets you use a third-party network virtual appliance in Google Cloud)

Cloud Router Benefits

• you do not need to configure static routes when the local network changes

Cloud Router Features

• uses BGP to dynamically exchange routes between your Google Cloud VPC network and the remote network
• automatically propagate prefixes and next hop changes between your VPC network and the on premise network
• router appliances use internal IPv4 addresses of Google Cloud VMs as BGP IP addresses; the other connections use link-local IPv4 addresses in the 169.254.0.0/16 range as BGP IP addresses
• For Dedicated Interconnect, you can either specify candidate link-local addresses for BGP addresses, or Google Cloud can select unused link-local addresses automatically.
• For Partner Interconnect, Google Cloud selects unused link-local addresses automatically.
• For HA VPN and Classic VPN using dynamic routing, you can specify the BGP addresses
• Cloud Router supports Multiprotocol BGP (MP-BGP) and can exchange IPv6 prefixes over BGP IPv4 sessions. IPv6-only BGP sessions are not supported.

Cloud Router Security

• MD5 authentication is available when using HA VPN, Cloud InterConnect or third part network appliances. To enable MD5 authentication, provide a secret shared key—used to configure the Cloud Router and the on-premise router. After setup, Cloud Router uses the key to authenticate the BGP peer as described in RFC 2385.
• Google Cloud Router logs are collected with Google Cloud Logging and can sent to a Cloud pub/sub with an HTTP push forwarder for further analysis
• Google Cloud performs regular maintenance events to release new features and to improve reliability. During maintenance, new software tasks are provisioned.
• Cloud Router maintenance is an automatic process, and it is designed so that it does not interrupt routing as maintenance events take less than a minute

Cloud Router Pricing

• Cloud Router is free of charge.
• General networking costs apply to control plane traffic which is typically negligible.