Cloud NAT
1. Cloud NAT
Next, you will learn how to use Cloud NAT to provide access to the public Internet for resources without an external IP address. Let's start with a simple use case. Janet is a network engineer at Cymbal Corporation. Cymbal has several non-production environments, development, testing, and staging, on Google Cloud. These environments host various VMs that need occasional outbound Internet access for tasks such as downloading software updates and dependencies, and accessing external testing tools or resources. Cymbal needs a streamlined, cost-effective way to handle outbound traffic without burning through their limited pool of public IPs. The solution, Janet decides to use Cloud NAT. This managed service provides a pool of highly available IP addresses that Janet can dynamically assign to their servers on demand. Cloud NAT translates the private IP addresses of Cymbal servers to a public IP address for outbound communication, seamlessly masking the internal network from the outside world. Cloud NAT is the Google managed network address translation service. It lets you provision your application instances without public IP addresses, and it also lets them access the Internet in a controlled and efficient manner. With Cloud NAT, your private instances can access the Internet for updates, patching, configuration management and more. Cloud NAT, as shown on the right, offers several advantages when compared to other NAT offerings, as shown on the left. As a fully managed software-defined service, Cloud NAT differs from traditional NAT proxy solutions. There are no NAT middle proxies in the path from the instance to the destination. Instead, each instance is a located NAT IP address, along with a slice of the associated port range. This allocated IP address and port range are used by the instance to perform NAT. This design is free of checkpoints and is highly reliable, performant, and scalable. Cloud NAT lets you configure multiple NAT IP addresses per NAT gateway. You can scale based on the size of your network without having to add or manage another NAT gateway. NAT IP allocation has two modes: manual and auto. The manual mode provides full control when specifying IP addresses. If you want to allow NAT addresses on the receiving side, use the manual mode. The auto mode enables the NAT IP addresses to be allocated and scaled automatically based on the number of instances. For a full overview of Cloud NAT features, see Cloud NAT overview in the Google Cloud documentation. In this diagram, Cloud NAT enables two private instances to access and update server on the Internet, which is referred to as outbound NAT. However, Cloud NAT does not implement inbound NAT. In other words, hosts outside your VPC network can't directly access any of the private instances behind the Cloud NAT gateway. Your VPC networks remain isolated and secure. With Cloud NAT, VMs without external IP addresses can access destinations on the Internet. For example, you might have VMs that only need Internet access to download updates or complete provisioning. Cloud NAT allows you to configure these VMs with an internal IP address. Thus, your organization needs fewer external IP addresses. Cloud NAT can be configured to automatically scale the number of NAT IP addresses that it uses. Cloud NAT supports VMs that belong to managed instance groups, including those with auto scaling enabled. Cloud NAT is not dependent on a single physical gateway device. Cloud NAT is a distributed, software-defined, managed service. You configure a NAT gateway on a Cloud Router, which provides the control plane for NAT. Cloud Router contains the NAT configuration parameters. Google Cloud runs and maintains processes on the physical machines that run your Google Cloud VMs. With Private Google Access, Cloud NAT never performs NAT for traffic sent to the selected external IP addresses of Google APIs and services. Google Cloud routes this traffic internally. When you configure a Cloud NAT gateway to apply to a subnet range, Google Cloud automatically enables Private Google Access for that range. Thus, any VMs in that subnet range use Private Google Access to connect to Google APIs and services. If the gateway provides NAT for a subnet range, Private Google Access is in effect for that range and can't be disabled manually. There are two types of Cloud NAT available in Google Cloud. First up, we have public NAT. Think of this as your gateway to the Internet. It enables the resources inside your virtual private cloud, those without public IP addresses, to securely access the online world. Here's how it works. When a resource needs to connect to the Internet, public NAT dynamically assigns it a public IP address from a shared pool. This way, your resource can browse, download updates, and do all the things it needs to online, while its internal IP address remains safely tucked away. Now, let's explore private NAT. This type of NAT you'll use for secure communication between different networks. One important subtype of private NAT is inter-VPC NAT. This comes in handy when you have multiple virtual private clouds that need to talk to each other. It acts like a translator, making sure communication flows smoothly between these different networks, all through a central hub like the Network Connectivity Center. With both public and private NAT options at your disposal, you have the flexibility to securely connect your resources in Google Cloud, whether they need to access the Internet or communicate with other private networks. Before we wrap up this module, let us take a look at a sample Gemini prompt related to private service access. Here's an example of an operational prompt. How can I use private service access to connect my VMs to third-party services? You'll be provided with a well-structured response that outlines the prerequisites, steps, and detailed commands that can help you configure private service access. The output structure makes it easy to follow and minimizes the risk of errors during implementation.2. Let's practice!
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