GCP Cloud Load Balancing

Overview

Cloud Load Balancing acts like a smart traffic controller for your applications, automatically directing user requests to the most appropriate server based on factors like server capacity, geographic location, and current load. This helps ensure your applications remain fast and available, even during peak usage.

Google offers several types of load balancers to suit different needs. External load balancers handle traffic from the internet, while internal load balancers manage traffic within your Google Cloud network. You can balance traffic at different layers: HTTP(S) for web applications, TCP/UDP for lower-level network protocols, and SSL for encrypted connections.

One of the most powerful features is that these load balancers are globally distributed by default. This means your applications can serve users from the closest possible location, reducing latency and improving user experience.

The service automatically scales with your traffic without any manual intervention, handling everything from a few requests per second to millions. It also includes built-in health checking to ensure traffic is only sent to healthy servers.

Example uses

1. Web Applications: Distribute traffic across multiple web servers to handle high-traffic websites and ensure consistent performance.

2. Global Applications: Serve users from different regions by automatically routing them to the nearest healthy server.

3. Microservices: Balance traffic between different service instances while handling internal east-west traffic.

4. Gaming Servers: Use UDP load balancing to distribute players across game server instances while maintaining low latency.

Integration with other GCP services

Cloud Load Balancing works seamlessly with other Google Cloud services:

• Compute Engine: Distribute traffic across virtual machine instances
• Google Kubernetes Engine: Balance traffic for containerized applications
• Cloud CDN: Cache content at edge locations for faster delivery
• Cloud Armor: Add security policies and DDoS protection
• Cloud Monitoring: Track performance metrics and set up alerts
• SSL Certificates: Manage HTTPS certificates automatically

Similar services in other clouds

Other major cloud providers offer comparable load balancing services:

• AWS:

  • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
    • Application Load Balancer (ALB)
    • Network Load Balancer (NLB)
    • Classic Load Balancer

• Azure:

  • Azure Load Balancer
  • Application Gateway

While these services provide similar core functionality, GCP Cloud Load Balancing stands out with its global load balancing by default and integration with Google's global network infrastructure.