Managing IP Addresses

The exam topics for the Associate Cloud Engineer certification specifically identifies two IP address–related topics: expanding CIDR blocks and reserving IP addresses.

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 It is also important to understand the difference between ephemeral and static IP addresses. Static IP addresses are assigned to a project until they are released. These are used if you need a fixed IP address for a service, such as a website. Ephemeral IP addresses exist only as long as the resource is using the IP address, such as on a VM running an application only accessed by other VMs in the same project. If you delete or stop a VM, ephemeral addresses are released.

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Expanding CIDR Blocks

CIDR blocks define a range of IP addresses that are available for use in a subnet. If you need to increase the number of addresses available, for example, if you need to expand the size of clusters running in a subnet, you can use the gcloud compute networks subnets expand-ip-range command...