Choosing the Right Load Balancer

In the last lesson, we looked at the essential part of the Google Cloud, “VPC networking”. VPC is a mandatory component so, it is involved in every use case.

In this lesson, we will look at the next component of the Networking ecosystem, the “load balancer”. Cloud load balancing is the process of distributing workloads across multiple computing resources.

Introduction

Cloud load balancing maximizes the availability of resources by routing traffic to appropriate healthy instances and also helps in monitoring the uptime of the service. The load balancer provides a single point of contact for a cluster of resources.

Goole Cloud provides different types of load balancing services based on the traffic you want to serve. You might have come across a load balancer while working with GKE. A load balancer needs a backend to distribute traffic which is served by the backend. We will look at the high-level overview of the load balancers.

Types of load balancers

• Open Main menu > Networking > Network services > Load balancing.

• Click on the Create a load balancer button.

You will see the available types of load balancers from which you can select the one depending upon the layer at which you want to distribute traffic.

The available types of load balancers are:

1. HTTPS Load Balancer.
2. TCP Load Balancer.
3. UDP Load Balancer.

Let’s see each one in detail.

HTTPS load balancing

HTTPS is at layer 7 in the OSI model. Hence it is called layer 7 load balancing. HTTPS load balancing provides 2 options based on the origin of the incoming traffic to your VM instance.

• External HTTPS traffic: If the traffic is coming from the internet to your VM instance using an IP address, you will use an external HTTPS load balancer.

• Internal HTTPS traffic: If the traffic is from internal VMs to other internal VM you will use the internal HTTPS load balancer.