Google Cloud Compute Engine: Ingress vs. Egress

Question

I read the FAQS about Google Cloud. It says there that Google Cloud will never charge for ingress traffic unless you have a load balancer in it, then, it is not free. But Google Cloud offers a free 1GB egress traffic excluding China and Australia.

I am running a Pritunl VPN server in my m2.micro server on Google Cloud Oregon Region. It is free but I do not know if my server sends egress traffic. Google Cloud does not provide ingress and egress traffic metrics on its dashboard.

Based on my OpenVPN statistics:

Bytes in: 312.33 MB
Bytes out: 43.24 MB

I'm from the Philippines by the way. So I'm not affected by the pricing in China and Australia.

How will I know if my server sends egress traffic?

Thank you.

Answer 1

A Googler answered my question on the Google Cloud subreddit.

Thanks to u/Cidan.

Ingress: Traffic coming into your VM. For example, if over your VPN you request a website in your browser, this request from your browser to the website would be ingress to the VM.

Egress: Traffic leaving your VM. Using the above example, traffic that leaves your VM to the website to actually get the request is egress and you are charged for it. When the VM gets the response from the website (ingress, free), it then has to send that response over the VM to your computer (egress, not free).

Visually, a request/response to a website over your VPN looks like this:

Your PC ----ingress---> VM ----egress---> Website

Website ----ingress---> VM ----egress---> Your PC

In the above scenario, you are charged for all egress. That is to say, "Bytes out" is what you are charged for.