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Managing Public Network Access

There are two ways to access virtual machines on Cycle.

  1. Gateway Service
  2. Load Balancer

Virtual machines need to have network settings for public network set to enable.

Learn more about virtual machine networking.

Gateway Service

Cycle provides a gateway service, available in each environment, that can be used as a router directly to a virtual machine.

The provisioning of gateway services works as follows:

For any given server which hosts a virtual machine that has public IPs attached to it, a gateway service will be initialized. After IPs are assigned to the virtual machine and the gateway initialized it must be started through the management modal available on the environment dashboard.

This service requires the virtual machine assign itself IP address(es) for the routing to work. To assign those addresses visit the virtual machine dashboard and use the form there.

For users wanting to assign a IPv4 address for routing, legacy mode must be enabled on the environment. This mode can only be enabled on environment create.

Linked Records and DMZ

The gateway service can be used directly by IP but can also be used in conjunction with linked records. To use the gateway with the linked record, select the DMZ checkbox.

Load Balancer

For virtual machine routing, the V1 load balancer must be used and not the HAProxy load balancer.

The load balancer service allows the user to point a linked record directly at a virtual machine. This method does not require the user assign an IP to the virtual machine. Simply create the linked record and make sure that the ports in the networking configuration are properly assigned. From there the rest is handled by the platform.

Similar to contianers, using the linked records + load balancer allows for:

  • Automatic HTTP to HTTPS redirection.
  • TLS termination at the load balancer.

Other load balancer configuration options will also work. Path matching and other advanced routing mechanics are usable with virtual machines the same way they are with containers. It should be noted that the "round-robin" load balancing that is provided to containers will not have an effect on routing to virtual machines simply because each virtual machine has only one instance maximum.