Using the TIER_1 setting on the network-performance-configs flag automatically upgrades your instance with increased network bandwidth.
To use these new features, make sure that you’re using the beta channel, and run gcloud components update to get the latest SDK. See Benchmarking higher bandwidth VM instances for more information on setting up VMs and running network throughput tests.
Differentiated networking
We strive to make it easy for our customers to take advantage of our differentiated features. Some unique aspects of high-throughput VM networking are:
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It’s an add-on feature. Since we’ve optimized networking performance on existing N2 and C2 VMs, you don’t need to reconfigure your workloads for any new instance types to take advantage of high-throughput networking. You also maintain all compatibility with scripts and automation tools.
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No additional inventory constraints. These networking capabilities don’t impose additional inventory constraints on your N2 or C2 deployments. In fact, you can upgrade VMs to use increased bandwidth in any zone where you can create an N2 or C2 instance.
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Best-in-class throughput. Google Cloud offers the best throughput performance of any cloud provider, and we’re doubling down on that performance with even more bandwidth offerings today.
Leveraging Google Cloud’s unique Andromeda architecture
Our new A2 instances with NVIDIA A100 GPUs support 100 Gbps networking today. Building on our work for A2s, we’re now able to offer higher bandwidth configurations on existing C2 and N2 VM families by optimizing Google Cloud’s unique Andromeda network, which we’ve upgraded to support hardware offloads such as zero-copy, TSO, and encryption, all without introducing downtime for your VM. The result is up-to 100 Gbps of encrypted traffic between VMs.
Get started today
High bandwidth configurations for N2 and C2 VMs are available in Preview today (in regions and zones that support these machine types) for all customers using the beta gCloud SDK or our Cloud APIs.
For more details, check out our documentation for network bandwidth as well as our how-to guide for benchmarking your VM’s network performance.
Please note that this feature is in public preview and will be billed at no cost throughout this period. The pricing in our documentation is general availability pricing and will go into effect when the public preview ends.