---
title: "Google Compute Engine"
description: "Reference for running Calico Open Source on Google Compute Engine covering supported networking modes and platform-specific routing requirements."
product: "Calico Open Source"
version: "3.32 (latest)"
section: "Reference"
canonical_url: "https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/reference/public-cloud/gce"
---

# Google Compute Engine

To deploy Calico in [Google Compute Engine (GCE)](https://cloud.google.com/compute/), you must ensure that traffic between containers on different hosts is not dropped by the GCE fabric. There are a few different options for doing this depending on your deployment.

## IP-in-IP encapsulation

Container traffic routing can be enabled by setting [IP-in-IP encapsulation](https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/networking/configuring/vxlan-ipip.md) and NAT outgoing on the configured Calico IP pools.

See the [IP pool configuration reference](https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/reference/resources/ippool.md) for information on how to configure Calico IP pools.

## GCE cloud routes

Traffic routing in GCE can be achieved by utilizing GCE cloud routes and running Calico in policy-only mode. Kubernetes GCE cloud provider integration simplifies route configuration by enabling Kubernetes to handle creating routes.

## Enabling workload-to-WAN traffic

To allow Calico networked containers to reach resources outside of GCE, you must configure outgoing NAT on your [Calico IP pool](https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/reference/resources/ippool.md).

GCE will perform outbound NAT on any traffic which has the source address of a virtual machine instance. By enabling outgoing NAT on your Calico IP pool, Calico will NAT any outbound traffic from the containers hosted on the virtual machine instances.