Gateway Service
The gateway service facilitates public IP assignments for virtual machines within an environment. It acts as a basic router, accepting public traffic and forwarding it to the target virtual machine. The gateway allows for seamless migration of virtual machines within the same region, without changing IP addresses.
If no virtual machines are present in an environment, or it isn't necessary to have direct IP address assignments to a virtual machine, the gateway service is not needed and won't be started.
For more information on configuring virtual machine networking, see Virtual Machine Networking.
How the Gateway Works
The gateway is a container that runs on nodes deployed within a hub. When a virtual machine is assigned an IP address directly, the IP is actually assigned to the gatway service. Ingress traffic to the IP is then forwarded to the correct virtual machine automatically.
This approach allows for virtual machines to be migrated between servers (within a region) without losing or changing its direct IP addresses.
IPv4 addresses
In order to have a public facing IPv4 address allocated to a virtual machine, the environment must be set to legacy mode. This is because IP addresses are assigned to the gateway, and the traffic needs to be forwarded using a private IPv4 address internally to the virtual machine.
As legacy mode currently MUST be set on environment create, and cannot be applied later, it is important to consider this when deploying environments that will have static IPv4s assigned to virtual machines.
Using Domains for Direct Routing via the Gateway
Cycle can automatically assign static IP addresses and attach them to a domain using a LINKED record
with the dmz flag set. For more information see here.
Configuring The Gateway on Cycle
Learn how to set up, configure and run load balancers on the Cycle platform.