Google Cloud service lets customers prioritize network traffic between clouds

In addition to the traffic priority, the service lets customers utilize traffic shaping controls to set the maximum bandwidth that each traffic class can use on Cross-Cloud Interconnect outbound data transfers, Sambi stated.

“A bandwidth percentage policy type lets users specify the target bandwidth share that each traffic class can use. Assigning percentages to each traffic class helps ensure that each traffic class can use its specified share of Cloud Interconnect bandwidth during congestion events,” Sambi stated.

“If excess bandwidth is available because a traffic class isn’t using its assigned share fully, the remaining bandwidth is shared equally among all other traffic classes,” Sambi stated.

Traditionally, customers have lacked the capability to prioritize traffic over Cloud Interconnect, forcing them to substantially overprovision bandwidth or risk subpar performance during periods of congestion. This can result in increased costs, inefficient resource utilization, and potential disruption to business operations. Application awareness addresses this need, Sambi stated.

Cloud Interconnect with application awareness lets organizations ensure consistent performance and reliability for their critical applications, even during peak traffic periods and congestion events on their Cloud Interconnect—allowing businesses to build distributed applications while consuming SaaS and AI/ML services, Sambi stated.

For improved Cross-Cloud Interconnect network management, Google Cloud added a feature called VPC Flow Logs that lets customers gain flow-level visibility into network traffic within Google Cloud. By recording packets sent and received by virtual machines, VPC Flow Logs lets customers analyze network traffic not only for performance monitoring and troubleshooting, but also for network forensics, security and compliance, and cost optimization, Sambi stated.