Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers various services and features to help you design and deploy a secure network architecture for your applications and data. In this article, you will learn how to use virtual private clouds (VPCs), firewalls, and load balancers to create a network that is isolated, protected, and scalable.
VPCs are logical networks that span across multiple regions and zones in GCP. They allow you to control the traffic and connectivity between your resources, such as compute instances, storage buckets, and databases. Firewalls are rules that define what traffic is allowed or denied to and from your VPC. They can be applied at the network, subnet, or instance level. Load balancers are services that distribute incoming traffic across multiple backend targets, such as instances or containers. They can improve the performance, availability, and resilience of your applications.
To create a VPC, you need to use the Cloud Console, the gcloud command-line tool, or the REST API. You can either use the default VPC that is automatically created for each project, or create a custom VPC with your own specifications. You can also create subnets within your VPC to divide it into smaller segments with different IP ranges, firewall rules, and routing options. You can choose between regional subnets, which span across all zones in a region, or zonal subnets, which are confined to a single zone.
Custom VPCs are recommended over default VPCs for more granular configurations geared towards your companies preferred specifications.
To configure firewall rules, you need to use the Cloud Console, the gcloud command-line tool, or the REST API. You can either use the default firewall rules that are automatically created for each VPC, or create custom firewall rules with your own specifications. You can specify the direction, priority, source, destination, ports, and protocols of the traffic that you want to allow or deny. You can also use tags, service accounts, or IP ranges to identify the sources and targets of the firewall rules.
To set up load balancers, you need to use the Cloud Console, the gcloud command-line tool, or the REST API. You can choose between different types of load balancers, depending on your needs and preferences. For example, you can use external load balancers to distribute traffic from the internet to your backend targets, or internal load balancers to distribute traffic within your VPC. You can also use global load balancers to balance traffic across multiple regions, or regional load balancers to balance traffic within a single region. You can also use network load balancers to balance traffic based on IP and port, or HTTP(S) load balancers to balance traffic based on HTTP(S) requests.
To monitor and troubleshoot your network, you can use various tools and features provided by GCP. For example, you can use Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring to collect and analyze the logs and metrics of your network resources and traffic. You can also use VPC Flow Logs to capture and record the details of the network flows in your VPC. You can also use Cloud Trace and Cloud Debugger to trace and debug the requests and responses of your applications. You can also use Network Intelligence Center to visualize and optimize your network performance and security.
To secure your network with best practices, you should follow some general guidelines and recommendations from GCP. For example, you should use private IP addresses and private Google access for your internal resources, and use public IP addresses and external load balancers for your external resources. You should also use firewall rules and network tags to restrict the traffic and access to your resources, and use service accounts and IAM roles to grant the minimum necessary permissions to your resources. You should also use encryption and SSL certificates to protect your data in transit and at rest, and use Cloud Armor and Cloud IDS to defend against malicious attacks and intrusions.
Segmentation and isolation of sensitive information is recommended to be configured on separate VPCs, this may also help satisfy some PCI-DSS compliance requirements.
Organizational policies: - Apply policies at the org level that prevents new projects from creating default VPCs, firewall rules and creating resources in every region. - Apply policies at the org level that limit users from creating service accounts and/or tokens and keys. - Apply policies at the org level that limit what type of resources can have an external IP address.