Is there a way to deploy "internal facing" applications in Google App Engine. AWS offers this capability as explained here and so does Azure as explained here.
What is the GCP equivalent for this? It appears App Engine Flexible Environment could be the answer but I could not find a clear documentation on whether Flexible Environment is indeed the way to host intranet facing applications. Is there someone from GCP who can advise?
Update
I tested the solution recommended by Dan recently. Listed below are my observations:
App Engine Flex allows deploying to a VPC and this allows VPN scenarios. The VPN scenarios however is for connections (originating) from App Engine to GCP VPCs or to other networks outside GCP which can be on-prem or in another cloud.
Access (destined) to the app itself from a GCP or another network is always routed via the internet facing Public IPs. There is no option to access the app at a private IP at the moment.
If there's another update, I will update it here.
Update 28Oct2021
Google has now launched Serverless Network Endpoint Group(NEG)s. With this users can connect AppEngine, Cloud Run & Cloud Function endpoints to a LoadBalancer. However at the moment, you can only use Serverless NEGs with an external HTTP(S) load balancer. You cannot use serverless NEGs with regional external HTTP(S) load balancers or with any other load balancer types. Google documentation for Serverless NEGs is available here.
I'm not sure this meets your requirements, but it's possible to set up an App Engine Standard application (not certain about Flexible) such that it is only accessible to users logged into your G-Suite domain. This is the approach I've used for internal-facing applications in the past, but it only applies if your case involves an entity using G-Suite.
You can set this up under the App Engine application Settings, under Identity Aware Proxy.
In this scenario the application is still operating at a publicly accessible location, but only users logged into your G-Suite domain can access it.
It should be possible with the GAE flexible environment. From Advanced network configuration:
You can segment your Compute Engine network into subnetworks. This
allows you to enable VPN scenarios, such as accessing databases within
your corporate network.
To enable subnetworks for your App Engine application:
Create a custom subnet network.
Add the network name and subnetwork name to your app.yaml file, as specified above.
To establish a VPN, create a gateway and a tunnel for a custom subnet network.
The standard env GAE doesn't offer access to the networking layer to achieve such goal.
Related
I have an web app (ReactJS) deployed in Google App Engine.
Problem:
The web app needs to be passed to security audit. Now they are asking for the internal network configuration of the VM where the app is deployed so that they can access the VM and perform greybox testing.
Note: Greybox testing is the combination of whitebox and blackbox testing where some of the internal structure of the application is known.
With GAE flexible, you can ssh to a deployed instance. You can provide them with access credentials and instructions to ssh to deployed instances.
With GAE standard, you cannot ssh to a deployed instance.
For both, the VMs are maintained and updated by Google. The testers should be able to review GAE documentation to address their security concerns.
I have standard app engine which makes an api call to another app engine within same shared VPC and project but the response is 403 forbidden error. Also the standard app engine to which i am making api call as gcloud app services update service-name --ingress=internal-only but as soon as i updated the configuration of the appEngine as gcloud app services update service-name --ingress=all. All the API calls are successfull.
Note : as required by gcp a serverless connector as been created and it is being used.
Questions
1 . How to communicate between Standard AppEngine to another Standard AppEngine within shared VPC?
2 . How can i communicate between AppEngnies with gcloud app services update service-name --ingress=internal-only configuration.
When you set the ingress to internal, you tell to App Engine: accept the traffic only coming from the VPCs of this project.
Thus, you need to tell to your other App Engine services: Reach this (App Engine) service only through the VPC else you will be forbidden.
Firstly, when you deploy on serverless environment, App Engine, Cloud Run or Cloud Functions, you are on the Google Cloud VPC, not on your project VPC.
Therefore, you have to set the egress to your App Engine to use the VPC. You need to plug a VPC connector to make this bridge between the GOOGLE serverless VPC world and your VPC.
However, it won't work. Indeed, when you set that on App Engine, only the traffic to the private IP use the serverless VPC connector, but not the public IPs. You haven't the capacity to set the VPC egress to all to route all the traffic through the VPC, public and private (as you can do with Cloud Functions and Cloud Run)
Thus, the App Engine, with serverless VPC connector or not, will contact the internal App Engine service through internet and not through the VPC and you will get a 403 every time.
In conclusion, you can't do that with App Engine, have a look to Cloud Run or Cloud Functions for this type of set up. You can also review your security design and don't rely on the origine of the traffic (from the VPC) but on the authentication of the traffic (use identity token and IAM service to ensure the communication security).
This is now possible to reach other App Engine services (configured with internal traffics only) thanks to Serverless VPC.
In app.yaml add to all the services which need to talk to each others (in and/or out connection):
vpc_access_connector:
name: projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/LOCATION/connectors/CONNECTOR
egress_setting: all-traffic
The doc : https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go/connecting-vpc.
We want to use an app engine flexible process to update our ElasticSearch index, which is on Google Kubernetes Engine. We need to connect to ElasticSearch via a http(s) address. What's the recommended way to do this? We don't want to expose the cluster to the external networks since we don't have authentication in front of it.
I've seen this SO post but both k8s and AE have changed a lot in the 2 years since the question/answer.
Thanks for your help!
The post you linked to was about App Engine Standard. App Engine Flex is built on top of the same Google Cloud networking that is used by Google Compute Engine virtual machines and Google Kubernetes Engine clusters. As long as you put the App Engine flex application into the same VPC as the Google Kubernetes Engine cluster you should be able to communicate between them using internal networking.
On the other hand, to expose a Kubernetes service to anything running outside of the cluster will require you to modify the service for Elastic search because by default Kubernetes services are only reachable from inside of the cluster (due to the way that the service IPs are allocated and reached via IPTables magic). You need to "expose" the service, but rather than exposing it to the internet via an external load balancer, you expose it to the VPC using an internal load balancer. See https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/internal-load-balancing.
in addition to Robert's answer, make sure that app engine and GKE are in the same region,
because Internal load balancers are not usable from other region.
check this https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/111021512
The documentation from Google is not really clear about it.
Here ( https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/vpn/overview ) it says
Google Cloud VPN securely connects your existing network to your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) network through an IPsec VPN connection
Considering that Both Google App Engine (GAE) and Google Compute Engine (GCE) are part of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it would mean that Google Cloud VPN works for both GAE and GCE.
Also, the section for Cloud VNP is at the same level than GAE and GCE in the project console :
But the documentation is located in /compute/docs which should not obviously be compatible with /appengine/docs
And here is a graph describing the tunnel, which talks only about GCE, which could exclude GAE :
So, is GAE compatible with Cloud VPN or is it restricted to GCE only ?
Google Cloud VPN securely connects your existing network to your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) network through an IPsec VPN connection. Therefore, only resources that are connected to GCP networks can communicate through Cloud VPN tunnels.
App Engine Flexible Environment is based on Google Compute Engine and consequently can connect to your remote network via Cloud VPNs. As described in this article, you can specify network settings in your app.yaml configuration file of your GAE Flexible application.
EDIT Rodrigo Torres has pointed out that this is NOW possible.
(Leaving up the old post below. It is now WRONG!!!)
OLD POST:
Google App Engine standard CAN'T use VPN directly, however the new Flexible Google App Engine (now officially released, no longer in beta) CAN use it directly. Just set up google cloud VPN and your network from the console and make sure to include the network in your app.yaml file.
Flexible App Engine is be the easiest way for new applications to utilize VPN connections since there won't be any migration headaches.
For a standard app engine application that can't be ported over to flexible for whatever reason, you CAN still use a VPN connection - however, it requires a service to be running on flexible app engine (or compute engine), and your app will need to interface with it somehow. This may be the simplest method, as migrating from standard to flexible is not the simplest of tasks. I know - I've done it.
TLDR;
Are there any updates about this question?
Google App Engine communicate with Compute Engine over internal network
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It is possibile to enable HTTP traffic between App Engine and Compute Engine instances that are in the same Cloud Project?
Obviously denying all HTTP traffic from other sources.
Between AWS EC2/RDS/Beanstalk this is possibile with "security groups".
I think the best you can currently do is managed VMs (https://developers.google.com/cloud/managed-vms, early access right now). It's essentially managed VMs running custom code in the app engine project. I did not check if the managed VMs will be able to run together with other gce VMs in the same network - if they did one could just connect to the internal addresses of the other instances. There does not appear to be a configuration option to define a network so I'm leaning to guess that they won't be able to see each other on the network like that.
But as an answer to the general question, I don't think there is any way of referencing app engine runtimes as sources in gce network ACLs currently.
As of now In 2016 as google cloud has launched google cloud flexible environment appengine/docs/flexible/. So yes it is possible now because now both app engine and compute engine are present in same network and therefore using app engine you can access compute engine by using their internal Ip, also remember to delete all external firewall rules for your compute engines if you only want to allow access from app engine.
there isn't way to reference App Engine resource within GCE. If you are trying to access GCE only from App Engine app, then you could define ACL in GCE to let traffic only from your AppEngine external IP.