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Google Cloud Load Balancing
Provides managed global and regional application and network load balancers
Why learn Google Cloud Load Balancing?
Teams use Google Cloud Load Balancing to adopt managed load balancing without building the complete underlying platform themselves.
The problem it solves
Distributes traffic across healthy application endpoints
Where it came from
Google Cloud Load Balancing is Google Cloud's offering for managed load balancing. Its closest catalog counterparts are Azure Load Balancer and Elastic Load Balancing; they address the same broad need but are not feature-for-feature identical.
Build your understanding
Work through these exercises in order. Try the task before opening a reference.
- Explain the main responsibility of Google Cloud Load Balancing.
- Choose a workload that fits Google Cloud Load Balancing.
- Identify one operational tradeoff of Google Cloud Load Balancing.
- Compare Google Cloud Load Balancing with Azure Load Balancer.
- Compare Google Cloud Load Balancing with Elastic Load Balancing.
Documentation and sources
- Google Cloud products at a glance (docs.cloud.google.com)
Connect the ideas
Alternatives
Real World Example
Global Traffic Distribution for E-commerce Resilience
A global retail firm operating a web-based storefront across multiple continents needs to ensure high availability for its customers.
The business problem
The firm faces regional outages and traffic spikes that cause downtime when users are routed to a single, overloaded data center.
How this topic solves it
Google Cloud Load Balancing provides managed global traffic distribution, allowing the firm to route users to the nearest healthy backend instance regardless of their geographic location.
- Define a Global Forwarding Rule to direct incoming traffic to a specific target proxy.
- Configure a URL Map to route requests based on hostnames and path rules to backend services.
- Create Backend Services that group regional instance groups or serverless endpoints.
- Set up Health Checks to monitor the status of backend instances and remove unhealthy ones from the rotation.
Traffic enters through a global entry point and is distributed to regional backends.
Entry point
Routing logic
Regional group
Compute resources
- Client → Request → Global Forwarding Rule
- Global Forwarding Rule → Directs → URL Map
- URL Map → Routes → Backend Service
- Backend Service → Distributes → Instances
Expected business outcome
Improved service reliability and reduced latency by ensuring traffic is always served by the closest available healthy infrastructure.
Limitations and checks
Global load balancers require careful configuration of health checks; if health checks are too aggressive, they may cause flapping where healthy instances are incorrectly marked as down. Check this by monitoring the 'Health Check Status' metrics in the monitoring console.