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Google Cloud now allows users to bring their own IP (BYOIP) addresses to Google’s network infrastructure across all 20 available regions.

Google will provide public internet routing for customer IP addresses so they don’t have to be swapped out.

AWS and other cloud providers offer BYOIP capabilities, but Google Cloud states it’s the first cloud provider to offer this feature globally.

Improving cloud migration

According to the company, the BYOIP feature accelerates migration while minimising downtime, and also helps to reduce networking infrastructure costs.

Google Cloud VP of product management – networking, Shailesh Shukla, says managing the migration of IP addresses is one of the most challenging aspects of a cloud migration for network administrators.

Shukla says enterprises want to move applications to the cloud without having to change their IP addresses for ones from their cloud provider.

Now with Google Cloud, BYOIP prefixes can be broken into blocks as small as 16 addresses (/28), can be distributed to any region and can be used for global load balancers. In addition, users can also advertise the IP addresses they bring to Google Cloud globally.

The role of Bitly

Helping to develop BYOIP and accelerate its own migration to the cloud was Google Cloud customer Bitly.

Bitly is a link management platform enabling businesses to embed shorter links in their communications to simplify call-to-action. The service is used by tens of thousands of enterprises customers as well as SMEs, and shortens billions of links per year.

Google Cloud’s new BYOIP enables Bitly to move to the cloud and build a multi-region architecture. Without BYOIP, Bitly’s customers with hard-coded IPs in their DNS records would have to change their IPs in their DNS entries from Bitly IP addresses to Google IP addresses,

In addition, Bitly would have to maintain a network edge in a separate colocation facility to house legacy IP addresses, continuing to pay this cost until all IP addresses were brought into Google Cloud.

Commencing migration to Google Cloud in 2018 and now utilising BYOIP, Bitly has managed to speed up cloud migration, minimise downtime, reduce network infrastructure cost and has seen a 50% decrease in latency from client to a service for resolve time, connection time and download time, according to the company.