Release note — networking family, 2026-10-21
What the networking family covers at first release, the global-VPC fact it leads with, the absences recorded in the Cloud NAT and Cloud Armor overviews, and what is known to be missing.
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Networking family — first release
Added
| Document | What it carries |
|---|---|
reference/networking/vpc.md | global network, regional subnets, the two subnet modes, the implied rules, non-transitive peering, Shared VPC |
reference/networking/cloud-load-balancing.md | the current type names, which are global, proxy against passthrough, the Premium/Standard classic trap |
reference/networking/cloud-nat.md | software-defined rather than an appliance, the two NAT types, and the inbound sentence |
reference/networking/cloud-armor.md | the attachable balancer list, the rules language, the CRS versions |
reference/networking/private-service-connect.md | the five objects and which side owns each |
reference/networking/errors.md | indexed by symptom and topology, because networking failures have no error string |
guides/networking/reach-a-private-service.md | six steps, ending in a revocation test |
guides/parity/networking.md | the four rows that re-model a networking estimate |
The headline fact
A Google Cloud VPC network is global; only its subnets are regional. An AWS VPC and an Azure VNet are
regional. So N regional networks usually become one network with N subnets, and the transit object —
Transit Gateway, Virtual WAN — disappears. This is a re-modelling, not a count conversion, and it is the
largest structural difference in the whole hub.
Absences recorded rather than filled in
- The Cloud NAT overview does not name specific port-allocation modes; only "manual NAT IP address
assignment" is named, so nothing else is stated.
- The Cloud Armor overview does not name distinct policy classes (backend, edge, network-edge) as separate
categories. Those names exist elsewhere in the product's documentation and are not asserted here.
- The load-balancing overview was read for taxonomy, not for backend services, health checks, URL maps or
certificates — none of which this release documents.
Known missing
- Backend services, health checks, URL maps, forwarding rules, certificates.
- Cloud Interconnect, Cloud VPN, Network Connectivity Center and hybrid routing.
- Cloud DNS, including private zones and DNS peering.
- VPC Service Controls — named in the compute and IaC families as a cause of refusals, not documented.
- Network service tiers in their own right, beyond the classic-balancer note.
- VPC Flow Logs and Network Intelligence Center.