Cloud Load Balancing
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Worldwide autoscaling and load balancing
Scale your applications on Compute Engine from zero to full throttle with Cloud Load Balancing, with no pre-warming needed. Distribute your load-balanced compute resources in single or multiple regions—close to your users—and to meet your high availability requirements. Cloud Load Balancing can put your resources behind a single anycast IP and scale your resources up or down with intelligent autoscaling. Cloud Load Balancing comes in a variety of flavors and is integrated with Cloud CDN for optimal application and content delivery.
Global load balancing with single anycast IP
With Cloud Load Balancing, a single anycast IP front-ends all your backend instances in regions around the world. It provides cross-region load balancing, including automatic multi-region failover, which gently moves traffic in fractions if backends become unhealthy. In contrast to DNS-based global load balancing solutions, Cloud Load Balancing reacts instantaneously to changes in users, traffic, network, backend health, and other related conditions.
Software-defined load balancing
Cloud Load Balancing is a fully distributed, software-defined, managed service for all your traffic. It is not an instance- or device-based solution, so you won’t be locked into physical load balancing infrastructure or face the HA, scale, and management challenges inherent in instance-based LBs. You can apply Cloud Load Balancing to all of your traffic: HTTP(S), TCP/SSL, and UDP. You can also terminate your SSL traffic with HTTPS load balancing and SSL proxy.
Over one million queries per second
Cloud Load Balancing is built on the same frontend-serving infrastructure that powers Google. It supports 1 million+ queries per second with consistent high performance and low latency. Traffic enters Cloud Load Balancing through 80+ distinct global load balancing locations, maximizing the distance traveled on Google's fast private network backbone.
Seamless autoscaling
Cloud Load Balancing can scale as your users and traffic grow, including easily handling huge, unexpected, and instantaneous spikes by diverting traffic to other regions in the world that can take traffic. Autoscaling does not require pre-warming: you can scale from zero to full throttle in a matter of seconds.
Internal load balancing
Internal load balancing enables you to build scalable and highly available internal services for your internal client instances without requiring your load balancers to be exposed to the internet. GCP internal load balancing is architected using Andromeda, Google’s software-defined network virtualization platform. Internal load balancing also includes support for clients across VPN.
Support for cutting-edge protocols
Cloud Load Balancing includes support for the latest application delivery protocols. It supports HTTP/2 with gRPC when connecting to backends and also is the first major public cloud to offer QUIC support for our HTTPS load balancers to provide faster session setup, giving customers a more responsive application experience.
Features
HTTP(S) load balancing
HTTP(S) load balancing can balance HTTP and HTTPS traffic across multiple backend instances, across multiple regions. Your entire app is available via a single global IP address, resulting in a simplified DNS setup. HTTP(S) load balancing is scalable, fault-tolerant, requires no pre-warming, and enables content-based load balancing. For HTTPS traffic, it provides SSL termination and load balancing.
Cloud Logging
Cloud Logging for load balancing logs all the load balancing requests sent to your load balancer. These logs can be used for debugging as well as analyzing your user traffic. You can view request logs and export them to Cloud Storage, BigQuery, or Pub/Sub for analysis.
TCP/SSL load balancing
TCP load balancing can spread TCP traffic over a pool of instances within a Compute Engine region. It is scalable, does not require pre-warming, and health checks help ensure only healthy instances receive traffic. SSL proxy provides SSL termination for your non-HTTPS traffic with load balancing.
Seamless autoscaling
Autoscaling helps your applications gracefully handle increases in traffic and reduces cost when the need for resources is lower. You just define the autoscaling policy and the autoscaler performs automatic scaling based on the measured load. No pre warming required—go from zero to full throttle in seconds.
SSL offload
SSL offload enables you to centrally manage SSL certificates and decryption. You can enable encryption between your load balancing layer and backends to ensure the highest level of security, with some additional overhead for processing on backends.
High fidelity health checks
Health checks ensure that new connections are only load balanced to healthy backends that are up and ready to receive them. High fidelity health checks ensure that the probes mimic actual traffic to backends.
Advanced feature support
Cloud Load Balancing also includes advanced support features, such as IPv6 global load balancing, WebSockets, user-defined request headers, and protocol forwarding for private VIPs.
Affinity
Cloud Load Balancing affinity provides the ability to direct and stick user traffic to specific backend instances.
Cloud CDN integration
Enable Cloud CDN for HTTP(S) load balancing for optimizing application delivery for your users with a single checkbox.
UDP load balancing
UDP load balancing can spread UDP traffic over a pool of instances within a Compute Engine region. It is scalable, does not require pre-warming, and health checks help ensure only healthy instances receive traffic.
Google Cloud Platform's Load Balancing simplifies our deployment and seamlessly delivers the scale and high-availability we need. We can easily handle 150,000 requests per second with no warmup time and no preparation needed on our end. Having this peace of mind has made a dramatic difference compared with our days configuring specialized load balancing hardware.
Arnaud Granal, CTO, Adcash
Resources
HTTP(S) load balancing
Network load balancing
Autoscaling instances
Next ’19: Cloud Load Balancing deep dive
Pricing
All flavors of Cloud Load Balancing use is priced by the same hourly service and data processing volume rates. Learn more.
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