Load balancing is the backbone of highly available, scalable applications. In Google Cloud, Cloud Load Balancing is a fully managed service that automatically distributes traffic to your backend services, ensuring performance, reliability, and global reach.
🌍 Global vs Regional Load Balancing
Global Load Balancing
- Distributes traffic across multiple regions.
- Uses a single anycast IP to route users to the closest healthy backend.
- Supports automatic failover between regions.
Regional Load Balancing
- Distributes traffic within a single region across zones.
- Ensures availability at the regional level.
✅ Both are software-defined → no hardware, no manual scaling. Traffic handling grows from zero to full throttle in seconds.
Google Cloud Load Balancing - Types
Application Load Balancer (HTTP / HTTPS)
Network Load Balancer (TCP / UDP / Other IP Protocols)
⚡ Protocols Supported
Layer 7 (Application Load Balancer)
- HTTP / HTTPS
Layer 4 (Network Load Balancer - Proxy Mode)
- TCP Proxy
- SSL Proxy (with SSL offloading)
Layer 4 (Network Load Balancer - Pass-through Mode)
- TCP, UDP, ICMP, ICMPv6, SCTP, ESP, AH, GRE
💡 Reminder: Each OSI layer builds on the ones below (Layer 7 uses Layers 1–6).
🧩 Key Terminology
🔹 Backend
Services that receive traffic:
- Instance Groups
- Cloud Storage
- App Engine
- Cloud Run
- GKE
- Cloud Functions
- Even external backends
🔹 Frontend
- Defines IP, port, and protocol (HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, etc.)
- This is the entry point users access.
🔹 Routing Rules (Application LB)
Path-based routing
- stacksimplify.com/app1 → App1
- stacksimplify.com/app2 → App2
Host-based routing
- app1.stacksimplify.com → App1
- app2.stacksimplify.com → App2
Rewrites
- Host Rewrite: app1.stacksimplify.com → app1.terraformguru.com
- Path Rewrite: /app1 → /app1new
Redirects, header manipulation, URL rewrites and more!
🚀 Why Use Google Cloud Load Balancing?
- High availability across zones, regions, and globally
- Scales seamlessly with demand
- Low latency with Anycast IP routing
- Integrates natively with all major Google Cloud services
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— Latchu | Senior DevOps & Cloud Engineer
☁️ AWS | GCP | ☸️ Kubernetes | 🔐 Security | ⚡ Automation
📌 Sharing hands-on guides, best practices & real-world cloud solutions
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