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Enterprises looking to move applications to Google Cloud can retain their original IP address under the Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) address feature, with claims that migration time can be accelerated while downtime and networking infrastructure costs can be cut down.
According to Shailesh Shukla, vice president of product management networking at Google, the BYOIP feature will be introduced across all of Google’s 20 regions, and claimed it was the first cloud provider to do so globally.
The decision to implement BYOIP, according to Shukla, was due to customer feedback.
“We hear from our customers that managing the migration of IP addresses can be one of the most challenging aspects of a cloud migration for network administrators,” Shukla said.
If users decide to migrate and retain their original IP addresses, Shukla said BYOIP prefixes can be broken down into a minimum of 16 addresses, can be sent to any region, can be used for global load balancers and can be advertised globally to all peers.
BYOIP has already been used by link management platform Bitly, which is used by tens of thousands of enterprise users and shortens billions of links.
Bitly was looking to move to the cloud and build up a multi-region architecture, but faced the issues of their customers being required to change IPs in their DNS entries and dealing with the cost of maintaining a network edge in a separate colocation facility during the migration.
The platform started to make its move to Google Cloud approximately one year ago, and since that time, they worked alongside Google to develop BYOIP and accelerated their migration to Google Cloud.
In the process, Shukla claimed Bitly saw both downtime and networking infrastructure cost for maintaining public IPs in their on-premises data centres cut down.
Bitly also saw a 50 per cent decrease in latency from clients to services for resolve time, connection time and download time.
“By bringing our own IP addresses to Google Cloud, we moved our applications without requiring our customers to change their IP address whitelists, minimising risk, downtime, and toil during migration,” said Russell Holbrook, vice president of engineering at Bitly.
