Network service tiers
Optimize your network for performance or cost
Empowering customers to optimize their cloud
network for performance or price
With Network Service Tiers, Google Cloud is the first major
public cloud to offer a tiered cloud network.
Delivering choice with Network Service Tiers
Premium
Give users an exceptional high-performing network experience
by using Google's global network.
Standard
Get control over network costs while delivering
performance comparable with other cloud providers.
| Category | Premium | Standard |
|---|---|---|
| Network | High-performance routing | Lower-performance network |
| Network Services | Network services such as Cloud Load Balancing are global (single VIP for backends in multiple regions) | Network services such as Cloud Load Balancing are regional (one VIP per region) |
| Service Level |
99.99% availability SLA High performance and reliability |
99.9% availability SLA Performance and availability comparable to other public cloud providers (lower than Premium) |
| Use Case | Performance, reliability, global footprint, and user experience are your main considerations | Cost is your main consideration, and you're willing to trade-off some network performance |
Premium Tier
Premium Tier delivers Google Cloud traffic over Google's well-provisioned, low-latency,
highly reliable global network. This network consists of an extensive global
private fiber network with over 100 points of presence (POPs) across the globe.
By this measure, Google's network is the largest of any public cloud provider.
See the Google Cloud network map.
Google Cloud customers benefit from the global features within global
load balancing, another Premium Tier feature. You not only
get the management simplicity of a single anycast IPv4 or
IPv6 Virtual IP (VIP), but can also expand seamlessly
across regions and overflow or fail over to other regions.
Standard Tier
Our new Standard Tier delivers Google Cloud traffic over a transit ISP's network
with the latency and reliability typical of transit ISPs, and with a network quality
comparable to that of other public clouds, at a lower price than our Premium Tier.
We also provide only regional network services
in Standard Tier, such as the new regional Cloud Load Balancing
service. In this tier, your load-balancing VIP
is regional, similar to other public cloud offerings, and
it adds management complexity compared to Premium Tier global
load balancing if you require a multi-region deployment.
Performance-optimized Premium Tier
Deliver your traffic on Google's high-performance global network
Deliver the best possible application experience to your users
Performance measured by Cedexis at
https://itm.cloud.com/google-reports/
Deploy global load balancing, with the management simplicity of
a single anycast IPv4 or IPv6 Virtual IP across multiple regions.
Seamlessly expand, overflow, or fail over into other regions.
Premium Tier supported for Cloud CDN
Lower outbound traffic costs with Standard Tier
Run cost-sensitive workloads
Performance comparable with other public cloud offerings
Performance measured by Cedexis at
https://itm.cloud.com/google-reports/
Deploy regional load balancing to lower costs for
single-region workloads
Choose the right tier for each workload
Full flexibility in selecting the tier for each application
Specify the tier per instance or instance template
Specify the tier per load balancer for Compute Engine and Cloud Storage backends
Enable the tier at the project level to apply it to
all underlying applications (coming soon)
Network Service Tiers availability
| Features | Premium Tier | Standard Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Plain VM instance | Yes - Regional | Yes - Regional |
| Application Load Balancer | Yes - Global only | Yes - Regional |
| Network Load Balancer (non-HTTP traffic) | Yes - Global or regional | Yes - Regional |
| Internal load balancers | Yes - Regional VIP (+ client can be anywhere) | No |
| Google Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine | Yes | Yes - Regional but only by using load balancing |
| Cloud CDN | Yes | No |
| Cloud VPN/Cloud Router | Yes | No |
| IPv6 | Yes | No |
“Google’s global network is one of the strongest features for choosing Google Cloud.”—Ravi Yeddula Sr. Director Platform Architecture & Application Development, The Home Depot