change regional external static IP to global static external IP address

[Silambarasan Sekar]

Hi There,

We have an external static IP address (IPv4) which was reserved a while ago and is regional/zonal (us-central). We have created a HTTP(s) load balancer and wanted to use the reserved IP address but figured out that the regional/zonal IPs can not be attached to the load balancer as they make use of global static external IP address.

Kindly let us know how we can change the external static IP to global static external IP address as we can not change the IP address and need the same one.  

Thanks & Regards

Venu

[Kamran (Google Cloud Support)]

Hello Venu,

As described in this article:

Static external IP addresses can be either a regional or global resources. A regional static IP address allows resources of that region or resources of zones within that region to use the IP address. In this case, VM instances and regional forwarding rules can use a regional static IP address.

Global static external IP addresses are available only to global forwarding rules, used for global load balancing. You cannot assign a global IP address to a regional or zonal resource.

That being said, it's not currently possible to convert a regional static IP address to a global static IP address or vice versa. However, a feature request to promote a regional static external IP address to global static IP address has been already filed on GCP public issue tracker. Please don't hesitate to add your email address to CC to get notifications whenever there are any progress updates posted on the thread.

The other option that I'd like to recommend is using Domain Names which can help your projects to be more robust against unwanted changes of the external IP addresses. With any change of external IP address, you can safely update DNS records of your domain name with new value of the external IP address and keep using the same domain name address.

Sincerely,