Google Cloud Platform for Developers

Internal and external IP addresses

Compute Engine instances may have multiple network interfaces, each of which can be assigned one primary internal IP address, one external IP address, and any number of secondary internal IP addresses. As the name suggests, external IP addresses are reachable from outside of the VPC network while internal IP addresses are not.

By default, each Compute Engine instance is assigned a single public and private IP address. In the previous example, two Compute Engine instances were created, one with an internal and external IP address (us-east-vm-1) and another with only an internal IP address (eu-west-vm-1). As a result, only the us-east-vm-1 instance was publicly accessible.

While instances created without an ...