The VM-Series firewall secures North/South traffic to and from the internet to protect applications from known and unknown threats. A Google project can have up to five VPC networks. For a typical example of an internet gateway, refer to the Google configuration examples.

In public cloud environments, it is a common practice to use a scale-out architecture (see the figure below) rather than larger, higher performing VMs. This architecture (sometimes called a sandwich deployment) avoids a single point of failure and enables you to add or remove firewalls as needed.