Why advanced networking matters in GCP - See It in Action

Why advanced networking matters

📖 Scenario: You are working for a company that wants to improve its cloud network setup on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The company needs to organize its network resources to ensure secure, fast, and reliable communication between its cloud services and users.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network with subnets and firewall rules to understand why advanced networking matters for cloud infrastructure.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a VPC network named company-vpc

Add two subnets named frontend-subnet and backend-subnet with specified IP ranges

Create a firewall rule named allow-internal to allow internal communication between instances

Create a firewall rule named allow-ssh to allow SSH access from any IP

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Companies use advanced networking in cloud to separate workloads, secure communication, and control access between services and users.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and network administrators need to design and manage VPCs, subnets, and firewall rules to ensure secure and efficient cloud environments.

1

Create the VPC network

Create a VPC network called company-vpc using the gcloud command with the --subnet-mode=custom option.

GCP

# Your code here to create the VPC network

Need a hint?

Use the gcloud compute networks create command with the --subnet-mode=custom flag to create a VPC network that allows you to define your own subnets.

2

Add subnets to the VPC network

Add two subnets to the company-vpc network: create frontend-subnet in region us-central1 with IP range 10.0.1.0/24, and create backend-subnet in region us-central1 with IP range 10.0.2.0/24. Use the gcloud compute networks subnets create command for each subnet.

GCP

gcloud compute networks create company-vpc --subnet-mode=custom
# Your code here to create frontend-subnet and backend-subnet

Need a hint?

Use the gcloud compute networks subnets create command twice, once for each subnet, specifying the network, region, and IP range.

3

Create firewall rule to allow internal communication

Create a firewall rule named allow-internal on the company-vpc network that allows all protocols and ports for traffic between instances with IP ranges 10.0.0.0/16. Use the gcloud compute firewall-rules create command with --allow all and --source-ranges=10.0.0.0/16.

GCP

gcloud compute networks create company-vpc --subnet-mode=custom
gcloud compute networks subnets create frontend-subnet --network=company-vpc --region=us-central1 --range=10.0.1.0/24
gcloud compute networks subnets create backend-subnet --network=company-vpc --region=us-central1 --range=10.0.2.0/24
# Your code here to create allow-internal firewall rule

Need a hint?

Use gcloud compute firewall-rules create with --allow all and --source-ranges=10.0.0.0/16 to allow all internal traffic.

4

Create firewall rule to allow SSH access

Create a firewall rule named allow-ssh on the company-vpc network that allows TCP port 22 from any IP address. Use the gcloud compute firewall-rules create command with --allow tcp:22 and --source-ranges=0.0.0.0/0.

GCP

gcloud compute networks create company-vpc --subnet-mode=custom
gcloud compute networks subnets create frontend-subnet --network=company-vpc --region=us-central1 --range=10.0.1.0/24
gcloud compute networks subnets create backend-subnet --network=company-vpc --region=us-central1 --range=10.0.2.0/24
gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-internal --network=company-vpc --allow all --source-ranges=10.0.0.0/16
# Your code here to create allow-ssh firewall rule

Need a hint?

Use gcloud compute firewall-rules create with --allow tcp:22 and --source-ranges=0.0.0.0/0 to allow SSH from anywhere.