How to setup VPN from on-premises to Google Cloud VPC
We want to be able to connect to my on-premise database from our google cloud kubernetes.
We are currently attempting to do so by using "Create a VPN connection" from within the google console.
In the field IP address, I am forced to create (or pick from existing) "External IP Addresses".
I am able to link a single VM-instance to this External IP Address. But I want my VPN connection/tunnel to be between my on-premises network and EVERYTHING within my Google cloud network.
This IP should not just work as External IP Addr. for a single instance. I need to make it a gateway to the network as a whole. What am I missing?
Thanks in advance.
Another way to frame the question: How do I find the IP Address of the gateway to my Google cloud network (VPC) and how do I supply that IP to the VPN Connection creation ?
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4 Answers
The Cloud VPN connects your on-premises to the VPC, that means every Instance, Cluster or other products that use Google Cloud Engine (GCE).
As mentioned in a previous answer from avinoam-meir the VPN has at least two components: Gateway and Tunnel but I will add a third one: Type of routing.
a) Gateway: This is where you can add an existing or reserve any static IP address (from the Google Pool of External IP Addresses).
b) Tunnel: Where the encapsulated and encrypted traffic will flow to reach the Local IP ranges.
c) Type of routing: Cloud VPN has three possibilities:
Depending on the type you choose, the routing happens in a different way but in general terms, it will propagate your subnetwork(s) to your on-premises network and receive the routes from it.
Important: Remember to open your firewall on your GCP VPC to receive traffic from your on-premises IP Ranges as the default and implied rule for Ingress will block it.
- The implied allow egress rule: An egress rule whose action is allow, destination is 0.0.0.0/0, and priority is the lowest possible (65535) lets any instance send traffic to any destination.
- The implied deny ingress rule: An ingress rule whose action is deny, source is 0.0.0.0/0, and priority is the lowest possible (65535) protects all instances by blocking incoming traffic to them.
The answer was simpler than I thought.
My question was:
How do I find the IP Address of the gateway to my Google cloud network (VPC) and how do I supply that IP to the VPN Connection creation ?
The answer is simply to fill out the "Create a VPN connection" page. It automatically sets up whatever IP you get/choose in the "IP Address" field as the gateway. I did NOT need to configure this IP address to work as a gateway. Simply getting it assigned in this step is enough. Google does the rest behind the scenes.
You need to distinguish between gateway IP address and local IP range of the VPN tunnel
The gateway IP address is the IP of the gateway where all the packets from your on-premises arrive encapsulated and encrypted.
The local IP range of the VPN tunnel is the range of IPs that can be reached through the VPN tunnel. By default this is all the private IP addresses of your GCP network
Create a NAT gateway [1] with Kubernetes Engine and Compute Engine Network Routes to route outbound traffic from an existing GKE cluster through the NAT Gateway instance.
Use that NAT gateway IP address to create a VPN connection to remote peer gateway.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/solutions/using-a-nat-gateway-with-kubernetes-engine