For Cloud Environments, symmetric hashing is incredibly valuable when dealing with stateful network appliances or applications. Typically, network appliances or applications deployed in GCP provide advanced Layer 7 functionality, such as protocol inspection or HTTPS parsing for malicious payloads. These devices often need to participate in both the request and response portions of the TCP flow.
Additionally, for high-availability environments, symmetric hashing is critical for ensuring data integrity as all session data utilizes the same firewall route and target compute node. Active-active load balancing requires symmetric hashing as session integrity is required. Without the hash and session integrity, these stateful capabilities are not available.
