Key terms

This page provides important terms that apply to Cloud Router. Review these terms to better understand how Cloud Router works.

For more information, see the Cloud Router overview.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) terms

The following terminology applies to the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which Cloud VPN and Cloud Interconnect use for dynamic routing.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)

An exterior gateway routing protocol standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFC 1722. BGP automatically exchanges routing and reachability information among autonomous systems on the internet. Your device is BGP-capable if it can perform BGP routing, which means that you can enable the BGP protocol on it and assign it a BGP IP address and an autonomous system number. To determine if your device supports BGP, see the vendor information for your device or contact your device's vendor.

autonomous system (AS)

A collection of connected IP routing prefixes under the control of a single administrative entity or domain that presents a common routing policy to the internet, such as an internet service provider (ISP), a large company, or a university.

autonomous system number (ASN)

A unique identifier allocated to each autonomous system that uses BGP routing. For more information, see RFC 7300.

MD5 authentication

A method of BGP peer authentication that uses the MD5 message-digest algorithm. When you use this approach, BGP peers must use the same authentication key, or a connection cannot be established between them. Later, every segment routed between the peers is verified. For more information about MD5 authentication, see RFC 2385. To find out whether your device supports MD5 authentication, see the vendor information for the device or contact the vendor. To get support with using Cloud Router MD5 authentication, see Support.

Google Cloud terms

The following terminology applies to Google Cloud and its features.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud is a suite of public cloud computing services offered by Google. For more information, see Google Cloud products.

project ID

The ID of your Google Cloud project. A project contains networking resources such as networks, subnets, and Cloud VPN gateways as described in the VPC network overview. For a description of the difference between project name, project ID, and project number, see Identifying projects. You can view the project ID in the Google Cloud console.