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REASONS.md

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The Top 3 Concerns

These factors determined the choices I made in writing this guide:

  1. Security & Privacy
  2. Cost
  3. Performance

Security & Privacy

Google Cloud is not targeted towards consumers. It is targeted towards businesses and developers/programmers. There are no real privacy concerns here, because this service is enterprise and government grade: customers of Google Cloud are typically in Education, Financial Services, Government, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Media and Entertainment, and Retail. In order to secure customers in these industries, Google Cloud abides by stringent compliance policies.

You can see more about how Google Cloud handles security, transparency, privacy, and compliance here: https://cloud.google.com/security/

Running a VPN service on Google's Cloud is a vastly superior option over trusting an unknown 3rd party VPN provider with your data.

Cost

You get a lot for nothing. A free server running on 1 shared vCPU with 0.6GB of RAM, a cloud based firewall, and a spiffy app and website to monitor everything is nothing very special. Many providers offer this.

The real juicy stuff is in the network connectivity you get for no cost: a static Anycast IPv4 address.

Performance

Network

This significantly outperforms other public cloud offerings.

With the Premium Tier Network, inbound traffic from your tablet/phone/computer to your Pi-Hole in Google Cloud goes over Google’s private, high performance network at the POP closest to you. Google delivers outbound traffic returning from Pi-Hole in Google Cloud to your tablet/phone/computer on Google’s network, and exits at the POP closest to you. You can be anywhere in the world.

Routers will select the desired path on the basis of number of hops, distance, lowest cost, latency measurements or based on the least congested route.

This means that most of this traffic will reach your device with a single hop to your ISP: so you enjoy minimum congestion (latency), and maximum performance.

DNS

DNS latency is caused by the following 2 concerns:

  1. latency between the client and the DNS resolving server
  2. latency between the resolving servers and other name servers

Choosing a DNS server with the lowest latency is the simplest way to address concern #1.

Use Google Public DNS

Google's Public DNS has the lowest latency to your Pi-Hole, because it resolves completely within Google's internal private Premium Tier network. A round trip ping to Google's Public DNS from within Google's Cloud is 0.16ms, whereas a provider such as Cloudflare with direct peering to Google's network has a ping of 16ms.

Kernel

Wireguard Module

In a blog post announcing Ubuntu 20.04's arrival Canonical stated:

WireGuard is included in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

This has been met with confusion because Ubuntu 20.04 ships with Linux Kernel 5.4, and Wireguard is officially in Linux Kernel 5.6. Canonical backported the Wireguard kernel module into 5.4 for Ubuntu 20.04

The proof is in the pudding:

modprobe wireguard # executes successfully

You can verify the wireguard module is available:

find /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -type f -name 'wireguard.ko'

You can verify the wireguard module is loaded:

lsmod | grep wireguard