Hi folks,
Appreciate your patience while I did some research, as I wanted to make sure I fully understood all of the nuances here before I responded, and to make sure we prepared any additional updates to the documentation to clarify things going forward.
In summary, there are three areas to cover:
- The publishing of new IP addresses without prior notice
- IP addresses assigned to non-US regions
- AppSheet’s behavior with database traffic to and from different regions
We’ll go through each one in turn.
New IP addresses
As discussed on the thread, we have a process for making customers aware of new IP addresses prior to their being put into production. The post that kicked off the thread suggested that new IP addresses had been put into production without warning - but this turns out to be inaccurate.
In this particular case, some engineers were auditing our infrastructure and identified a series of IP addresses that had been allocated, were not yet in use, but had not been documented. They updated the internal documentation around those addresses, and that triggered the update of the support article and the post that started this thread.
The important thing to note is - none of those IP addresses are in use today. Adding them to the list now ensures that if we have an immediate need to begin using those IP addresses in the future, customers would not be surprised to see traffic originating from those IPs.
Unfortunately, the original post lacked that important piece of context, creating the impression we had suddenly started using new IPs without providing notice to the community. In the future, we will be clear that any new IP addresses have been assigned, but not put into production yet.
IP addresses in non-US regions
The other part of the post that created some concern and confusion stemmed from the listing of the regions where these IP addresses were assigned. Since some IP addresses were listed in regions like Asia where AppSheet historically has not sourced traffic, it opened questions as to whether customers were going to start seeing database traffic from new regions that might incur transit costs.
As stated above, those IP addresses are allocated but not yet in use. In addition, listing the regions for those IP addresses is misleading. While these new IP addresses are currently assigned to the listed regions, we have the ability to move those IP addresses to other regions, so customers shouldn’t assume that traffic from those IP addresses will be coming from those regions.
How does AppSheet process and route traffic destined for Cloud SQL databases?
The final question that arose, here and in another thread in the community, was a request for guidance as to database placement - in what regions should Cloud SQL databases be located to avoid transit fees associated with AppSheet connecting to a database from a different region?
Unfortunately, the answer is: it depends, and can be difficult to predict. When an app user launches an AppSheet app, the connection to AppSheet will be routed to the “closest” region where we have servers located. That region will then be the source of any database traffic related to that user’s activities.
Practically speaking, this means that US-based app users will be primarily routed to US regions, while EU-based users will primarily be routed to the EU region. Users in other parts of the world may get routed to either - and the region that any user is connecting to may change as Internet routing topology changes.
Consequently, we can’t guarantee that putting a database in any particular region will avoid transit costs associated with AppSheet connecting from a different region. As an example, even if all of an app’s users are in the EU, some EU users may still get routed to a US region, if the US region appears to be closer to the user.
We do not currently have any plans to add additional regions that might affect existing users. Instead, we are currently working on deploying a dedicated EU instance of AppSheet, where all of the user data and routing will happen within the EU. Specific customers will be onboarded on that instance of AppSheet based on their requirements, so current users and applications will not be affected. In the future, we may deploy additional dedicated instances in other regions, for performance and data sovereignty considerations.
In summary - the IP addresses that were published are not yet in use, and we provided them ahead of any future need. The regions that those IP addresses are assigned to are not directly relevant to where they might be used in the future, and we have no current plans to add regions that might impact traffic flows.
We’re going to update the documentation to be more clear about some of these topics, and we’ll continue to update it in the future. I’m happy to answer any questions or clarify further, and I appreciate everyone’s patience while I gathered this information.
Thanks - Matt
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