GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your security team mandates that no Compute Engine VMs receive external IP addresses. A managed instance group running in subnet "prod-us-central1-a" must fetch operating-system updates from public package repositories several times a day. The solution must block all unsolicited inbound connections from the internet, scale automatically as the group grows, and require minimal ongoing maintenance. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Launch a small Linux VM with an external IP in the subnet, configure it with IP forwarding and iptables NAT rules, and set it as the default gateway for the instance group.
Create a regional Cloud NAT gateway, attach it to the existing Cloud Router for the VPC, and configure it to serve the prod-us-central1-a subnet.
Enable Private Google Access on the subnet so the instances can reach external package repositories without needing public IP addresses.
Assign ephemeral external IP addresses to the instances during the update window, then remove the addresses afterward using an automation script.

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Answer Description

Cloud NAT is a regional, managed network address translation service that lets instances without external IP addresses initiate outbound TCP, UDP, and supported ICMP traffic to the internet while never accepting inbound connections. A Cloud NAT gateway attaches to a Cloud Router so that the NAT IP ranges can be advertised, and the gateway automatically scales its address and port capacity as the number of instances grows.

Enabling Private Google Access would allow traffic only to Google APIs and services, not to external package repositories. Operating a self-managed Linux NAT VM introduces a single point of failure and ongoing maintenance overhead. Temporarily assigning external IP addresses violates the security mandate and still allows unsolicited inbound traffic while the addresses are present.

Therefore, deploying a regional Cloud NAT gateway that serves the prod-us-central1-a subnet is the correct solution.

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