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0 pointsprofmonocle2y ago0 comments

This is one thing Google Cloud does well - traffic to Google services bypasses NAT gateway, even over IPv4.

I was curious how they do this, so I set up a service on Google Cloud Run that just echo'd the user's public IP address. When curl'd over IPv4, it said I was coming from a unique local (i.e. private) IPv6 address. The private IPv4 address of my server was embedded in the address, along with some other random-looking bits that probably identified my VPC somehow. So they must have been doing some sort of stateless IPv4 to IPv6 translation behind the scenes.

It was a clever solution that takes advantage of the fact that all of Google's API endpoints are dual-stack, even though (at the time) they didn't support IPv6 on customer VMs. The problem AWS currently has is not all of their internal endpoints are dual-stack, so even using IPv6 can't save you from cloud NAT costs when accessing AWS services.

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formercoder2y ago

Our network is completely software defined, so we just fake it to the VM and make it look like it's talking right to the service, and do all the routing via magic.

asmor2y ago

Honestly, I really like that the AWS implementation is not magic. AWS is the only one of the big 3 cloud providers where I can reasonably assume I get what it says on the lid, and that it works with the pieces it advertises working with (whereas other cloud providers tend to be more nebulous in their documentation).

GCP especially takes a lot more trial and error building systems that compose a bunch of different primitives. That the API is awful doesn't help either.

nvarsj2y ago

I agree with this, having built large dev platforms on both. GCP in my experience takes 2-5x the engineering effort, to deal with "GCPisms" and the terrible documentation. AWS is simpler and does what it says most of the time.

victor1062y ago

This is very cool.

Have quite a bit of experience with AWS and Azure, and only recently learning about GCP, it’s very clear that Google nailed Some of GCP’s core cloud engineering concepts and got them exactly right.

Although unfortunately they will never reach the size of AWS or (maybe Azure? It’s hard to tell Azure’s market size as they don’t disclose it.)

hidden802y ago

Check this out → https://www.juniper.net/documentation/us/en/software/junos/s...

rcme2y ago

I know Google’s load balancers use BGP. So a load balancer will have a single IP address, but you don’t talk directly to that IP. Google’s servers take over as traffic is being routed.

rescbr2y ago

The problem AWS has is the design of VPC internals.

As the first hyperscaler, they gotta pay the legacy tax.

saurik2y ago

AWS didn't start with "VPC", and people who still had access to the much-easier-to-conceptualize EC2 Classic only got forced off recently; Amazon VPC wasn't actually launched publicly until after Google Cloud.

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