Express route transmissions between virtual machines and cloud service computing devices

A method, comprising:

• receiving, at a computing device of a cloud service and from one or more load balancers of the cloud service, a first data packet originated from a virtual machine (VM), the first data packet including:
• a first source internet protocol (IP) address associated with the VM, and
• a second source IP address associated with a host computing device that hosts the VM;
• generating, based at least in part on a tunneling protocol, a second data packet that includes:
• a first destination IP address associated with the VM,
• a tunneling protocol ID, and
• a second destination IP address associated with the host computing device, and
• sending the second data packet to the VM via a direct return route that bypasses the one or more load balancers.

A system, comprising:

• a host computing device of a datacenter, the host computing device hosting a virtual machine (VM);
• and
• a public cloud service of the datacenter, the public cloud service including:
• one or more load balancers for distributing workloads among a plurality of computing devices, and
• the plurality of computing devices, a computing device of the plurality of computing devices being configured to:
• receive, from the one or more load balancers and based at least in part on a cloud tunneling protocol, a first data packet,
• identify the VM as a source of the first data packet,
• generate, based at least in part on the cloud tunneling protocol, a second data packet, and
• send the second data packet to the VM via a direct return route that bypasses the one or more load balancers.