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By Sankari Venkataraman, Technical Program Manager

We are happy to announce that Partner Interconnect, launched in beta in April, is now generally available. Partner Interconnect lets you connect your on-premises resources to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) from the partner location of your choice, at a data rate that meets your needs.

With general availability, you can now receive an SLA for Partner Interconnect connections if you use one of the recommended topologies. If you were a beta user with one of those topologies, you will automatically be covered by the SLA. Charges for the service start with GA (see pricing).

Partner Interconnect is ideal if you want physical connectivity to your GCP resources but cannot connect at one of Googleâ€™s peering locations, or if you want to connect with an existing service provider. If you need help understanding the connection options, the information here can help.

In this blog we will walk through how you can start using Partner Interconnect, from choosing a partner that works best for you all the way through how you can deploy and start using your interconnect.

Choosing a partner

If you already have a service provider partner for network connectivity, you can check the list of supported service providers to see if they offer Partner Interconnect service. If not, you can select a partner from the list based on your data center location.

Some critical factors to consider are:

Make sure the partner can offer the availability and latency you need between your on-premises network and their network.
Check whether the partner offers Layer 2 connectivity, Layer 3 connectivity, or both. If you choose a Layer 2 Partner, you have to configure and establish a BGP session between your Cloud Routers and on-premises routers for each VLAN attachment that you create. If you choose a Layer 3 partner, they will take care of the BGP configuration.
Please review the recommended topologies for production-level and non-critical applications. Google provides a 99.99% (with Global Routing) or 99.9% availability SLA, and that only applies to the connectivity between your VPC network and the partner’s network.

Bandwidth options and pricing

Partner Interconnect provides flexible options for bandwidth between 50 Mbps and 10 Gbps. Google charges on a monthly basis for VLAN attachments depending on capacity and egress traffic (see options and pricing).

Setting up Partner Interconnect VLAN attachments

Once youâ€™ve established network connectivity with a partner, and they have set up interconnects with Google, you can set up and activate VLAN attachments using these steps:

Create VLAN attachments.
Request provisioning from the partner.
If you have a Layer 2 partner, complete the BGP configuration and then activate the attachments for traffic to start. If you have a Layer 3 partner, simply activate the attachments, or use the pre-activation option.

With Partner Interconnect, you can connect to GCP where and how you want to. Follow these steps to easily access your GCP compute resources from your on-premises network.