cloud-foundation-fabric/fast/stages/2-networking-a-peering/README.md

Networking with VPC Peering

This stage sets up the shared network infrastructure for the whole organization. It adopts the common “hub and spoke” reference design, which is well suited to multiple scenarios, and offers several advantages versus other designs:

• the “hub” VPC centralizes external connectivity to on-prem or other cloud environments, and is ready to host cross-environment services like CI/CD, code repositories, and monitoring probes
• the “spoke” VPCs allow partitioning workloads (e.g. by environment like in this setup), while still retaining controlled access to central connectivity and services
• Shared VPC in both hub and spokes splits management of network resources in specific (host) projects, while still allowing them to be consumed from workload (service) projects
• the design also lends itself to easy DNS centralization, both from on-prem to cloud and from cloud to on-prem

Connectivity between hub and spokes is established here via VPC Peering, which offers a complete isolation between environments, and no choke-points in the data plane. Different ways of implementing connectivity, and their respective pros and cons, are discussed below.

The following diagram illustrates the high-level design, and should be used as a reference for the following sections. The final number of subnets, and their IP addressing design will of course depend on customer-specific requirements, and can be easily changed via variables or external data files without having to edit the actual code.

Table of contents

• Design overview and choices
  • VPC design
  • External connectivity
  • Internal connectivity
  • IP ranges, subnetting, routing
  • Internet egress
  • VPC and Hierarchical Firewall
  • DNS
• Stage structure and files layout
  • VPCs
  • VPNs
  • Routing and BGP
  • Firewall
  • DNS architecture
  • Private Google Access
• How to run this stage
  • Provider and Terraform variables
  • Impersonating the automation service account
  • Variable configuration
  • Running the stage
  • Post-deployment activities
• Customizations
  • Changing default regions
  • Configuring the VPN to on prem
  • Adding an environment

Design overview and choices

VPC design

The hub/landing VPC hosts external connectivity and shared services for spoke VPCs, which are connected to it via VPC peering. Spokes are used here to partition environments, which is a fairly common pattern:

• one spoke VPC for the production environment
• one spoke VPC for the development environment

Each VPC is created into its own project, and each project is configured as a Shared VPC host, so that network-related resources and access configurations via IAM are kept separate for each VPC.

The design easily lends itself to implementing additional environments, or adopting a different logical mapping for spokes (e.g. one spoke for each company entity, etc.). Adding spokes is a trivial operation, does not increase the design complexity, and is explained in operational terms in the following sections.

In multi-organization scenarios, where production and non-production resources use different Cloud Identity and GCP organizations, the hub/landing VPC is usually part of the production organization, and establishes connections with production spokes in its same organization, and non-production spokes in a different organization.

External connectivity

External connectivity to on-prem is implemented here via HA VPN (two tunnels per region), as this is the minimum common denominator often used directly, or as a stop-gap solution to validate routing and transfer data, while waiting for interconnects to be provisioned.

Connectivity to additional on-prem sites or other cloud providers should be implemented in a similar fashion, via VPN tunnels or interconnects in the landing VPC sharing the same regional router.

Internal connectivity

Each environment has full line of sight with the Landing VPC, and hence with any networks interconnected with it (e.g. your onprem environment). Environments cannot communicate with each other (prod to dev and viceversa). If this is a requirement, and according to your specific needs and constraints, solutions based on full-mesh peerings, VPNs or NVA should be added to this design.

As mentioned initially, there are of course other ways to implement internal connectivity other than VPC peering. These can be easily retrofitted with minimal code changes, but introduce additional considerations for service interoperability, quotas and management.

This is a summary of the main options:

• HA VPN (implemented by 2-networking-b-vpn)
  • Pros: simple compatibility with GCP services that leverage peering internally, better control on routes, avoids peering groups shared quotas and limits
  • Cons: additional cost, marginal increase in latency, requires multiple tunnels for full bandwidth
• VPC Peering (implemented here)
  • Pros: no additional costs, full bandwidth with no configurations, no extra latency, total environment isolation
  • Cons: no transitivity (e.g. to GKE masters, Cloud SQL, etc.), no selective exchange of routes, several quotas and limits shared between VPCs in a peering group
• Multi-NIC appliances (implemented by 2-networking-c-nva and 2-networking-e-nva-bgp)
  • Pros: additional security features (e.g. IPS), potentially better integration with on-prem systems by using the same vendor
  • Cons: complex HA/failover setup, limited by VM bandwidth and scale, additional costs for VMs and licenses, out of band management of a critical cloud component

IP ranges, subnetting, routing

Minimizing the number of routes (and subnets) in use on the cloud environment is an important consideration, as it simplifies management and avoids hitting Cloud Router and VPC quotas and limits. For this reason, we recommend careful planning of the IP space used in your cloud environment, to be able to use large IP CIDR blocks in routes whenever possible.

This stage uses a dedicated /16 block (which should of course be sized to your needs) for each region in each VPC, and subnets created in each VPC derive their ranges from the relevant block.

Spoke VPCs also define and reserve two "special" CIDR ranges dedicated to PSA (Private Service Access) and Internal Application Load Balancers (L7 LBs).

Routes in GCP are either automatically created for VPC subnets, manually created via static routes, or dynamically programmed by Cloud Routers via BGP sessions, which can be configured to advertise VPC ranges, and/or custom ranges via custom advertisements.

In this setup:

• routes between multiple subnets within the same VPC are automatically programmed by GCP
• each spoke exchanges routes with the hub/landing through VPC peering
• spokes don't exchange routes, directly or indirectly
• on-premises is connected to the landing VPC and dynamically exchanges BGP routes with GCP using HA VPN

Internet egress

Cloud NAT provides the simplest path for internet egress. This setup uses Cloud NAT, with optional per-VPC NAT gateways. Cloud NAT is disabled by default; enable it by setting the enable_cloud_nat variable.

Several other scenarios are possible of course, with varying degrees of complexity:

• a forward proxy, with optional URL filters
• a default route to on-prem to leverage existing egress infrastructure
• a full-fledged perimeter firewall to control egress and implement additional security features like IPS

Future pluggable modules will allow to easily experiment, or deploy the above scenarios.

VPC and Hierarchical Firewall

The GCP Firewall is a stateful, distributed feature that allows the creation of L4 policies, either via VPC-level rules or more recently via hierarchical policies applied on the resource hierarchy (organization, folders).

The current setup adopts both firewall types, and uses hierarchical rules on the Networking folder for common ingress rules (egress is open by default), e.g. from health check or IAP forwarders ranges, and VPC rules for the environment or workload-level ingress.

Rules and policies are defined in simple YAML files, described below.

DNS

DNS goes hand in hand with networking, especially on GCP where Cloud DNS zones and policies are associated at the VPC level. This setup implements both DNS flows:

• on-prem to cloud via private zones for cloud-managed domains, and an inbound policy used as forwarding target or via delegation (requires some extra configuration) from on-prem DNS resolvers
• cloud to on-prem via forwarding zones for the on-prem managed domains

DNS configuration is further centralized by leveraging peering zones, so that

• the hub/landing Cloud DNS hosts configurations for on-prem forwarding, Google API domains, and the top-level private zone/s (e.g. gcp.example.com)
• the spokes Cloud DNS host configurations for the environment-specific domains (e.g. prod.gcp.example.com), which are bound to the hub/landing leveraging cross-project binding; a peering zone for the . (root) zone is then created on each spoke, delegating all DNS resolution to hub/landing.
• Private Google Access is enabled via DNS Response Policies for most of the supported domains

To complete the configuration, the 35.199.192.0/19 range should be routed on the VPN tunnels from on-prem, and the following names configured for DNS forwarding to cloud:

• private.googleapis.com
• restricted.googleapis.com
• gcp.example.com (used as a placeholder)

From cloud, the example.com domain (used as a placeholder) is forwarded to on-prem.

This configuration is battle-tested, and flexible enough to lend itself to simple modifications without subverting its design, for example by forwarding and peering root zones to bypass Cloud DNS external resolution.

Stage structure and files layout

VPCs

VPCs are defined in separate files, one for landing and one for each of prod and dev.

These files contain different resources:

• project (projects): the "host projects" containing the VPCs and enabling the required APIs.
• VPCs (net-vpc): manages the subnets, the explicit routes for {private,restricted}.googleapis.com and the DNS inbound policy for the trusted landing VPC. Non-infrastructural subnets are created leveraging resource factories. Sample subnets are shipped in data/subnets and can be easily customized to fit users' needs. PSA are configured by the variable psa_ranges if managed services are needed.
• Cloud NAT (net-cloudnat) manages the networking infrastructure required to enable internet egress.

VPNs

Connectivity to on-prem is implemented with HA VPN (net-vpn) and defined in vpn-onprem.tf. The file provisionally implements a single logical connection between onprem and landing at europe-west1, and the relevant parameters for its configuration are found in variable vpn_onprem_primary_configs. An example configuration is provided below.

Routing and BGP

Each VPC network (net-vpc) manages a separate routing table, which can define static routes (e.g. to private.googleapis.com) and receives dynamic routes from BGP sessions established with neighbor networks (i.e. landing receives routes from onprem and any other interconnected network). Spokes receive dynamic routes programmed on the Landing VPC from the VPC peering.

Static routes are defined in vpc-*.tf files, in the routes section of each net-vpc module.

Firewall

VPC firewall rules (net-vpc-firewall) are defined per-vpc on each vpc-*.tf file and leverage a resource factory to massively create rules. To add a new firewall rule, create a new file or edit an existing one in the data_folder directory defined in the module net-vpc-firewall, following the examples of the "Rules factory" section of the module documentation. Sample firewall rules are shipped in data/firewall-rules/landing and can be easily customised.

Hierarchical firewall policies (folder) are defined in main.tf and managed through a policy factory implemented by the net-firewall-policy module, which is then applied to the Networking folder containing all the core networking infrastructure. Policies are defined in the rules_file file, to define a new one simply use the firewall policy module documentation". Sample hierarchical firewall rules are shipped in data/hierarchical-ingress-rules.yaml and can be easily customised.

DNS architecture

The DNS (dns) infrastructure is defined in the respective dns-xxx.tf files.

Cloud DNS manages onprem forwarding, the main GCP zone (in this example gcp.example.com) and environment-specific zones (i.e. dev.gcp.example.com and prod.gcp.example.com).

Cloud environment

Per the section above Landing acts as the source of truth for DNS within the Cloud environment. Resources defined in the spoke VPCs consume the Landing DNS infrastructure through DNS peering (e.g. prod-landing-root-dns-peering). Spokes can optionally define private zones (e.g. prod-dns-private-zone) - granting visibility to the Landing VPC ensures that the whole cloud environment can query such zones.

Cloud to on-prem

Leveraging the forwarding zones defined on Landing (e.g. onprem-example-dns-forwarding and reverse-10-dns-forwarding), the cloud environment can resolve in-addr.arpa. and onprem.example.com. using the on-premises DNS infrastructure. Onprem resolvers IPs are set in variable dns.onprem.

DNS queries sent to the on-premises infrastructure come from the 35.199.192.0/19 source range, which is only accessible from within a VPC or networks connected to one.

On-prem to cloud

The Inbound DNS Policy defined in module landing-vpc (net-landing.tf) automatically reserves the first available IP address on each created subnet (typically the third one in a CIDR) to expose the Cloud DNS service so that it can be consumed from outside of GCP.

How to run this stage

This stage is meant to be executed after the resource management stage has run, as it leverages the automation service account and bucket created there, and additional resources configured in the bootstrap stage.

It's of course possible to run this stage in isolation, but that's outside the scope of this document, and you would need to refer to the code for the previous stages for the environmental requirements.

Before running this stage, you need to make sure you have the correct credentials and permissions, and localize variables by assigning values that match your configuration.

Provider and Terraform variables

As all other FAST stages, the mechanism used to pass variable values and pre-built provider files from one stage to the next is also leveraged here.

The commands to link or copy the provider and terraform variable files can be easily derived from the stage-links.sh script in the FAST root folder, passing it a single argument with the local output files folder (if configured) or the GCS output bucket in the automation project (derived from stage 0 outputs). The following examples demonstrate both cases, and the resulting commands that then need to be copy/pasted and run.

../../stage-links.sh ~/fast-config

# copy and paste the following commands for '2-networking-a-peering'

ln -s ~/fast-config/providers/2-networking-providers.tf ./
ln -s ~/fast-config/tfvars/0-globals.auto.tfvars.json ./
ln -s ~/fast-config/tfvars/0-bootstrap.auto.tfvars.json ./
ln -s ~/fast-config/tfvars/1-resman.auto.tfvars.json ./

../../stage-links.sh gs://xxx-prod-iac-core-outputs-0

# copy and paste the following commands for '2-networking-a-peering'

gcloud alpha storage cp gs://xxx-prod-iac-core-outputs-0/providers/2-networking-providers.tf ./
gcloud alpha storage cp gs://xxx-prod-iac-core-outputs-0/tfvars/0-globals.auto.tfvars.json ./
gcloud alpha storage cp gs://xxx-prod-iac-core-outputs-0/tfvars/0-bootstrap.auto.tfvars.json ./
gcloud alpha storage cp gs://xxx-prod-iac-core-outputs-0/tfvars/1-resman.auto.tfvars.json ./

Impersonating the automation service account

The preconfigured provider file uses impersonation to run with this stage's automation service account's credentials. The gcp-devops and organization-admins groups have the necessary IAM bindings in place to do that, so make sure the current user is a member of one of those groups.

Variable configuration

Variables in this stage -- like most other FAST stages -- are broadly divided into three separate sets:

• variables which refer to global values for the whole organization (org id, billing account id, prefix, etc.), which are pre-populated via the 0-globals.auto.tfvars.json file linked or copied above
• variables which refer to resources managed by previous stage, which are prepopulated here via the 0-bootstrap.auto.tfvars.json and 1-resman.auto.tfvars.json files linked or copied above
• and finally variables that optionally control this stage's behaviour and customizations, and can to be set in a custom terraform.tfvars file

The latter set is explained in the Customization sections below, and the full list can be found in the Variables table at the bottom of this document.

Note that the outputs_location variable is disabled by default, you need to explicitly set it in your terraform.tfvars file if you want output files to be generated by this stage. This is a sample terraform.tfvars that configures it, refer to the bootstrap stage documentation for more details:

outputs_location = "~/fast-config"

Using delayed billing association for projects

This configuration is possible but unsupported and only exists for development purposes, use at your own risk:

• temporarily switch billing_account.id to null in 0-globals.auto.tfvars.json
• for each project resources in the project modules used in this stage (dev-spoke-project, landing-project, prod-spoke-project)
  • apply using -target, for example terraform apply -target 'module.landing-project.google_project.project[0]'
  • untaint the project resource after applying, for example terraform untaint 'module.landing-project.google_project.project[0]'
• go through the process to associate the billing account with the two projects
• switch billing_account.id back to the real billing account id
• resume applying normally

Running the stage

Once provider and variable values are in place and the correct user is configured, the stage can be run:

terraform init
terraform apply

Post-deployment activities

• On-prem routers should be configured to advertise all relevant CIDRs to the GCP environments. To avoid hitting GCP quotas, we recommend aggregating routes as much as possible.
• On-prem routers should accept BGP sessions from their cloud peers.
• On-prem DNS servers should have forward zones for GCP-managed ones.

Private Google Access

Private Google Access (or PGA) enables VMs and on-prem systems to consume Google APIs from within the Google network, and is already fully configured on this environment:

• DNS response policies in the landing project implement rules for all supported domains reachable via PGA
• routes for the private and restricted ranges are defined in all VPCs

To enable PGA access from on premises advertise the private/restricted ranges via the landing-to-onprem-primary-vpn variable, using router or tunnel custom advertisements.

Customizations

Changing default regions

Regions are defined via the regions variable which sets up a mapping between the regions.primary and regions.secondary logical names and actual GCP region names. If you need to change regions from the defaults:

• change the values of the mappings in the regions variable to the regions you are going to use
• change the regions in the factory subnet files in the data folder

Configuring the VPN to on prem

This stage includes basic support for an HA VPN connecting the landing zone in the primary region to on prem. Configuration is via the vpn_onprem_primary_config variable, that closely mirrors the variables defined in the net-vpn-ha.

Support for the onprem VPN is disabled by default so that no resources are created, this is an example of how to configure the variable to enable the VPN:

vpn_onprem_primary_config = {
  peer_external_gateways = {
    default = {
      redundancy_type = "SINGLE_IP_INTERNALLY_REDUNDANT"
      interfaces      = ["8.8.8.8"]
    }
  }
  router_config = {
    asn = 65501
    custom_advertise = {
      all_subnets = false
      ip_ranges   = {
        "10.1.0.0/16"     = "gcp"
        "35.199.192.0/19" = "gcp-dns"
        "199.36.153.4/30" = "gcp-restricted"
      }
    }
  }
  tunnels = {
    "0" = {
      bgp_peer = {
        address = "169.254.1.1"
        asn     = 65500
      }
      bgp_session_range               = "169.254.1.2/30"
      peer_external_gateway_interface = 0
      shared_secret                   = "foo"
      vpn_gateway_interface           = 0
    }
    "1" = {
      bgp_peer = {
        address = "169.254.2.1"
        asn     = 64513
      }
      bgp_session_range               = "169.254.2.2/30"
      peer_external_gateway_interface = 1
      shared_secret                   = "foo"
      vpn_gateway_interface           = 1
    }
  }
}

Adding an environment

To create a new environment (e.g. staging), a few changes are required.

Create a net-staging.tf file by copying net-prod.tf file, and adapt the new file by replacing the value "prod" with the value "staging". Running diff net-dev.tf net-prod.tf can help to see how environment files differ.

The new VPC requires a set of dedicated CIDRs, one per region, added to variable custom_adv (for example as spoke_staging_primary and spoke_staging_secondary).

custom_adv is a map that "resolves" CIDR names to actual addresses, and will be used later to configure routing.

Variables managing L7 Internal Load Balancers (l7ilb_subnets) and Private Service Access (psa_ranges) should also be adapted, and subnets and firewall rules for the new spoke should be added as described above.

DNS configurations are centralised in the dns-*.tf files. Spokes delegate DNS resolution to Landing through DNS peering, and optionally define a private zone (e.g. dev.gcp.example.com) which the landing peers to. To configure DNS for a new environment, copy one of the other environments DNS files e.g. (dns-dev.tf) into a new dns-*.tf file suffixed with the environment name (e.g. dns-staging.tf), and update its content accordingly. Don't forget to add a peering zone from the landing to the newly created environment private zone.

Files

name	description	modules	resources
dns-dev.tf	Development spoke DNS zones and peerings setup.	dns
dns-landing.tf	Landing DNS zones and peerings setup.	dns · dns-response-policy
dns-prod.tf	Production spoke DNS zones and peerings setup.	dns
main.tf	Networking folder and hierarchical policy.	folder · net-firewall-policy
monitoring-vpn-onprem.tf	VPN monitoring alerts.		google_monitoring_alert_policy
monitoring.tf	Network monitoring dashboards.		google_monitoring_dashboard
net-dev.tf	Dev spoke VPC and related resources.	net-cloudnat · net-vpc · net-vpc-firewall · project
net-landing.tf	Landing VPC and related resources.	net-cloudnat · net-vpc · net-vpc-firewall · project
net-prod.tf	Production spoke VPC and related resources.	net-cloudnat · net-vpc · net-vpc-firewall · project
outputs.tf	Module outputs.		google_storage_bucket_object · local_file
peerings.tf	None	net-vpc-peering
regions.tf	Compute short names for regions.
test-resources.tf	temporary instances for testing	compute-vm
variables-peerings.tf	Peering related variables.
variables.tf	Module variables.
vpn-onprem.tf	VPN between landing and onprem.	net-vpn-ha

Variables

name	description	type	required	default	producer
automation	Automation resources created by the bootstrap stage.	object({…})	✓		0-bootstrap
billing_account	Billing account id. If billing account is not part of the same org set is_org_level to false.	object({…})	✓		0-bootstrap
folder_ids	Folders to be used for the networking resources in folders/nnnnnnnnnnn format. If null, folder will be created.	object({…})	✓		1-resman
organization	Organization details.	object({…})	✓		0-bootstrap
prefix	Prefix used for resources that need unique names. Use 9 characters or less.	string	✓		0-bootstrap
alert_config	Configuration for monitoring alerts.	object({…})		{…}
custom_roles	Custom roles defined at the org level, in key => id format.	object({…})		null	0-bootstrap
dns	DNS configuration.	object({…})		{}
enable_cloud_nat	Deploy Cloud NAT.	bool		false
essential_contacts	Email used for essential contacts, unset if null.	string		null
factories_config	Configuration for network resource factories.	object({…})		{…}
outputs_location	Path where providers and tfvars files for the following stages are written. Leave empty to disable.	string		null
peering_configs	Peering configurations.	object({…})		{}
psa_ranges	IP ranges used for Private Service Access (CloudSQL, etc.).	object({…})		null
regions	Region definitions.	object({…})		{…}
service_accounts	Automation service accounts in name => email format.	object({…})		null	1-resman
vpn_onprem_primary_config	VPN gateway configuration for onprem interconnection in the primary region.	object({…})		null

Outputs

name	description	sensitive	consumers
cloud_dns_inbound_policy	IP Addresses for Cloud DNS inbound policy.
host_project_ids	Network project ids.
host_project_numbers	Network project numbers.
shared_vpc_self_links	Shared VPC host projects.
tfvars	Terraform variables file for the following stages.	✓
vpn_gateway_endpoints	External IP Addresses for the GCP VPN gateways.