Question

A financial analytics company runs hundreds of Compute Engine instances across multiple subnets in a Shared VPC. These instances have no external IP addresses but must make frequent outbound HTTPS calls to a third-party market-data provider's public API. During peak trading hours, engineers observe connection failures and log entries indicating dropped outbound connections, while off-peak traffic works fine. Investigation shows the instances are hitting a limit on simultaneous outbound connections to the same destination endpoint. What is the most appropriate action to resolve this?

Accepted Answer

Increase the minimum number of ports per VM (or enable dynamic port allocation) on the Cloud NAT gateway and add more external NAT IP addresses.

Answer

Assign external IP addresses to each instance so outbound connections bypass the NAT gateway entirely.

Answer

Replace Cloud NAT with a VPC peering connection to the third-party provider's network.

Answer

Enable Private Google Access on the subnets so the instances can reach the third-party API privately.