Network Service Tiers
Two tiers decide how traffic reaches the internet: over Google's private backbone (Premium) or via the public internet through your region's ISP (Standard). It is a performance-vs-cost tradeoff.
Premium vs Standard tier
| Premium (default) | Standard | |
|---|---|---|
| Path | Google's global backbone end to end | Public internet (ISP) as far as possible |
| Scope | Global | Regional |
| Performance | Highest, lowest latency | Best-effort, more variable |
| Cost | Higher egress | Lower egress |
| Global external Application LB | Supported | Not supported |
The global external Application LB and global external IPs require Premium tier. If a workload needs one anycast IP serving users worldwide, you must be on Premium. Standard tier only offers regional LBs and regional IPs.
- Premium is the default.
- Premium: traffic stays on Google's network until the closest edge to the user - egress point near the destination ("cold potato").
- Standard: traffic exits to the public internet near the source region ("hot potato") - cheaper, but leaves Google's network sooner.
- Tier can be set at the project default level or per-resource (per IP / per forwarding rule).
What network traffic costs
Ingress is free; egress is where the meter runs. Incoming traffic is not charged - unless a resource such as a load balancer processes it (and the response counts as billable egress).
| Traffic | Charged? |
|---|---|
| Ingress (no processing resource) | Free |
| Ingress processed by a load balancer | Charged (as egress) |
| Egress to same zone via internal IP | Free |
| Egress to Google products (YouTube, Maps, Drive) | Free |
| Egress to another Google Cloud service in the same region | Free |
| Egress between zones in the same region | Charged |
| Egress within a zone via external IP | Charged |
| Egress between regions | Charged |
Same-zone egress is free only through the instance's internal IP. Over an external IP, Compute Engine cannot tell the VM's zone, so it bills the traffic like cross-zone egress in the same region.
- Cross-zone in the same region: ~$0.01/GB.
- Same-zone via an external IP: ~$0.01/GB (internal IP is free).
- Between US ↔ Canada regions: ~$0.01/GB; other inter-region rates vary.
- Rates change - confirm with the calculator (below).
- Static and ephemeral external IPs are charged; ordered high → low ($/hr,
us-central1): unused static ~$0.010 > in-use standard VM ~$0.004 > preemptible ~$0.002. - A reserved static IP not attached to any resource costs more than one that is in use - unused reservations are penalized.
- Free when attached to a forwarding rule, Cloud NAT gateway, or VPN tunnel.
- External IPs on preemptible VMs are cheaper than on standard VMs.
Rates and exceptions change over time. Use the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator (web tool) to estimate cost of a resource set: pick instance type, region, and expected egress; adjust currency and time frame; then email the estimate or save it to a URL. Each service has its own pricing model, so always verify against current docs.