I have a MySQL database instance on Google Cloud SQL. Currently it has over 10 authorized ip addresses since multiple teams are accessing it from various locations. I would like to know if I can setup a VPN to this database instance and authorize just this ip address, instead of 10 addresses.
If that's possible, I would also like to know how many user accounts I can create for one VPN. I could not understand the Google Cloud documentation about setting up VPN. Please provide links to websites/tutorials/documentation that can help me with setting up a VPN in Google Cloud Platform.
Thanks.
Using cloud VPN and authorize only its external IP will not work for two reasons:
1) You can not specify in cloud SQL a private network (for example, 10.x.x.x) as an authorized network. as documented here.
2) Packets will arrive to cloud SQL after decapsulation which means that Cloud SQL get them as they come from different source IPs.
If you want more secure connection without IP white-listing, maybe using cloud SQL proxy.
Related
I'm currently developing an application for a client and their requirement is that the application needs in transit and at rest encryption. I assured that it was and was required to provide documentation for that. I referenced this documentation from Google Cloud's website. They replied by asking if my claim stands in light of the following section
Using a connection directly to a VM using an external IP or network load balancer IP
If you are connecting via the VM's external IP, or via a network-load-balanced IP, the connection does not go through the GFE. This connection is not encrypted by default and its security is provided at the user's discretion
My mobile application uses Firebase SDK to talk to the Firebase database and Firebase functions. I have no background in networking nor do I understand what is exactly being referenced here despite Googling the concepts. Is my data still encrypted? Does the above section apply to my use case?
No, that applies only to VMs and network load balancers. Both Cloud Functions (so long as you're using https for all requests) and the Firebase Realtime database encrypt data in transit.
I have a web app with a React frontend on Firebase that connects to a Django backend running on Google App Engine.
I have this setup duplicated for a "staging" environment. The problem is that anyone can access this staging environment.
I'd like to set this up so that you need to be on our VPN to access it.
Can someone point me in the right direction to setup this VPN and move the staging environment behind it?
If you are using Firebase Hosting I believe there's no other way to restrict the access and it does not have a firewall feature. You should use authentication method to restrict and limit who can access your web app.
In App Engine, you can restrict the access of your web server/application by using the following:
App Engine Firewall - #JohnHanley answer, control which using IP addresses can connect to the app.
Identity Aware Proxy - without using VPN you can limit who can access of your App Engine by using their user account. IAP is free but when used with Compute Engine, the required load balancing and firewall configuration may incur additional costs.
App Engine with Load Balancer - to secure and make your App Engine(Standard & Flexible) receives only internal and Cloud Load Balancing traffic
I'd like to set this up so that you need to be on our VPN to access
it.
You cannot limit access to just your VPN. App Engine is in Google's network and you cannot limit access based upon a VPN.
You can use App Engine firewall rules to control which IP addresses can connect to the service. Firebase however does not have firewall rules.
If the public side of your Internet router has a static IP address, then this is simple to setup.
I recommend using authorization to limit who can access your services.
I would like to develop a Google Cloud Function that will subscribe to file changes in a Google Cloud Storage bucket and upload the file to a third party FTP site. This FTP site requires allow-listed IP addresses of clients.
As such, it is possible to get a static IP address for Google Cloud Functions containers?
Update: This feature is now available in GCP https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/networking/network-settings#associate-static-ip
First of all this is not an unreasonable request, don't get gaslighted. AWS Lambdas already support this feature and have for awhile now. If you're interested in this feature please star this feature request: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112629904
Secondly, we arrived at a work-around which I also posted to that issue as well, maybe this will work for you too:
Setup a VPC Connector
Create a Cloud NAT on the VPC
Create a Proxy host which does not have a public IP, so the egress traffic is routed through Cloud NAT
Configure a Cloud Function which uses the VPC Connector, and which is configured to use the Proxy server for all outbound traffic
A caveat to this approach:
We wanted to put the proxy in a Managed Instance Group and behind a GCP Internal LB so that it would dynamically scale, but GCP Support has confirmed this is not possible because the GCP ILB basically allow-lists the subnet, and the Cloud Function CIDR is outside that subnet
I hope this is helpful.
Update: Just the other day, they announced an early-access beta for this exact feature!!
"Cloud Functions PM here. We actually have an early-access preview of this feature if you'd like to test it out.
Please complete this form so we can add you..."
The form can be found in the Issue linked above.
See answer below -- it took a number of years, but this is now supported.
https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/networking/network-settings#associate-static-ip
For those wanting to associate cloud functions to a static IP address in order to whitelist the IP for an API or something of the sort I recommend checking out this step by step guide which helped me a lot:
https://dev.to/alvardev/gcp-cloud-functions-with-a-static-ip-3fe9 .
I also want to specify that this solution works for Google Cloud Functions and Firebase Functions (as it is based on GCP).
This functionality is now natively part of Google Cloud Functions (see here)
It's a two-step process according to the GCF docs:
Associating function egress with a static IP address In some cases,
you might want traffic originating from your function to be associated
with a static IP address. For example, this is useful if you are
calling an external service that only allows requests from whitelisted
IP addresses.
Route your function's egress through your VPC network. See the
previous section, Routing function egress through your VPC network.
Set up Cloud NAT and specify a static IP address. Follow the guides at
Specify subnet ranges for NAT and Specify IP addresses for NAT to set
up Cloud NAT for the subnet associated with your function's Serverless
VPC Access connector.
Refer to link below:
https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/networking/network-settings#associate-static-ip
As per Google, the feature has been released check out the whole thread
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112629904
It's not possible to assign a static IP for Google Cloud Functions, as it's pretty much orthogonal to the nature of the architecture being 'serverless' i.e. allocate and deallocate servers on demand.
You can, however, leverage a HTTP proxy to achieve a similar effect. Setup a Google Compute Engine instance, assign it a static IP and install a proxy library such as https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-proxy. You can then route all your external API calls etc through this proxy.
However, this probably reduces scale and flexibility, but it might be a workaround.
Are the Google Cloud Endpoints only for REST?
I have a virtual machine with cassandra, and now I need (temporarly) to expose this machine for the world (the idea is to run a cassandra client in some computers in my home/office/...). Is Google Cloud Endpoints the best way to expose this machine to world?
I am assuming that you are running Cassandra on a Google Compute Engine (CE). When one runs a compute engine, one can specify that one wants a public internet address to be associated with it. This will allow an Internet connected client application to connect with it at that address. The IP address can be declared as ephemeral (it can be changed by GCP over time) or it can be fixed (I believe there will be a modest charge for its allocation). When one attempts to connect to the software running on the Compute Engine, a firewall rule (by default) will block the vast majority of incoming connections. Fortunately, since you own the CE you also own the firewall configuration. If we look here:
https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/3.0/cassandra/configuration/secureFireWall.html
we see the set of ports needed for different purposes. This gives us a hint as to what firewall rule changes to make.
Cloud Endpoints is for exposing APIs that YOU develop in your own applications and doesn't feel an appropriate component for accessing Cassandra.
I would like to develop a Google Cloud Function that will subscribe to file changes in a Google Cloud Storage bucket and upload the file to a third party FTP site. This FTP site requires allow-listed IP addresses of clients.
As such, it is possible to get a static IP address for Google Cloud Functions containers?
Update: This feature is now available in GCP https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/networking/network-settings#associate-static-ip
First of all this is not an unreasonable request, don't get gaslighted. AWS Lambdas already support this feature and have for awhile now. If you're interested in this feature please star this feature request: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112629904
Secondly, we arrived at a work-around which I also posted to that issue as well, maybe this will work for you too:
Setup a VPC Connector
Create a Cloud NAT on the VPC
Create a Proxy host which does not have a public IP, so the egress traffic is routed through Cloud NAT
Configure a Cloud Function which uses the VPC Connector, and which is configured to use the Proxy server for all outbound traffic
A caveat to this approach:
We wanted to put the proxy in a Managed Instance Group and behind a GCP Internal LB so that it would dynamically scale, but GCP Support has confirmed this is not possible because the GCP ILB basically allow-lists the subnet, and the Cloud Function CIDR is outside that subnet
I hope this is helpful.
Update: Just the other day, they announced an early-access beta for this exact feature!!
"Cloud Functions PM here. We actually have an early-access preview of this feature if you'd like to test it out.
Please complete this form so we can add you..."
The form can be found in the Issue linked above.
See answer below -- it took a number of years, but this is now supported.
https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/networking/network-settings#associate-static-ip
For those wanting to associate cloud functions to a static IP address in order to whitelist the IP for an API or something of the sort I recommend checking out this step by step guide which helped me a lot:
https://dev.to/alvardev/gcp-cloud-functions-with-a-static-ip-3fe9 .
I also want to specify that this solution works for Google Cloud Functions and Firebase Functions (as it is based on GCP).
This functionality is now natively part of Google Cloud Functions (see here)
It's a two-step process according to the GCF docs:
Associating function egress with a static IP address In some cases,
you might want traffic originating from your function to be associated
with a static IP address. For example, this is useful if you are
calling an external service that only allows requests from whitelisted
IP addresses.
Route your function's egress through your VPC network. See the
previous section, Routing function egress through your VPC network.
Set up Cloud NAT and specify a static IP address. Follow the guides at
Specify subnet ranges for NAT and Specify IP addresses for NAT to set
up Cloud NAT for the subnet associated with your function's Serverless
VPC Access connector.
Refer to link below:
https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/networking/network-settings#associate-static-ip
As per Google, the feature has been released check out the whole thread
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112629904
It's not possible to assign a static IP for Google Cloud Functions, as it's pretty much orthogonal to the nature of the architecture being 'serverless' i.e. allocate and deallocate servers on demand.
You can, however, leverage a HTTP proxy to achieve a similar effect. Setup a Google Compute Engine instance, assign it a static IP and install a proxy library such as https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-proxy. You can then route all your external API calls etc through this proxy.
However, this probably reduces scale and flexibility, but it might be a workaround.