Adding Custom Domain to your Google Compute Engine

If you haven’t already try out Google Cloud Platform, you should do it soon — with the world’s largest tech company offering cloud services on the same infrastructure as its own products, it pretty much sums up everything there is to say about the platform.

Recently, I switched away from using old-school web hosting providers to hosting my blog on Google Cloud Platform. I used the Cloud Launcher to fire up a Wordpress instance via Bitnami and had Google Cloud Platform pull up a monthly estimate for that — 4.49 monthly for a Debian OS virtual machine! Not bad for a start (after long term use discounts)!

I wanted to point it to a domain name that I had recently bought from GoDaddy. GoDaddy comes with DNS service so it was pretty simple to configure a static IP address to the DNS service and perform some masking. The not-so-straightforward portion was how do I configure a permanent static external IP address for my Compute Engine?

To configure a static external IP address, you need to reserve it in your Google Cloud Platform. You can find this under the “Networking” section that you can access from your GCP Console:

Once in “Networking”, select “External IP Addresses” on the left hand side of the screen: