I am trying to better understand the difference between Direct peering and Dedicated Interconnect as latter said it provides a physical connection to your on-prem and Direct Peering requires you to connect to their PoP location.
I am wondering how GCP can provide physical cable connection to lets say couple of my office locations in a corner of a street? Do they partner with local fibernet broadband providers (ISPs) to make this happen? Checking because I couldn’t image how GCP manages the infra needed for a Dedicated Interconnect option especially in densely populated countries?
1 Answers
Ah, the best comparison I can give you between Direct Peering and Cloud Interconnect can be found on this documentation page, where Google describes how they are similar and how they are different. Basically, (and here’s another good documentation page) Direct Peering is for when your internet-connected network (i.e. you have a Publicly routable ASN) are exchanging data with Google that is not necessarily GCP-specific. Cloud Interconnect is basically for when you want to connect your network to a VPC in GCP.
As for the costs and hardware and such, the second link above notes that, peering occurs at common physical locations and both Google and any peering network bear their own costs in reaching any such location. All Google’s peering locations are in its PeeringDB entry. And this page notes that For Dedicated Interconnect, you provision a cross connect between the Google network and your own router in a common location.