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 .