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Part-66: 🚦 Google Cloud Networking: Cloud Load Balancing (Global & Regional)

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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)

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Network Load Balancer (TCP / UDP / Other IP Protocols)

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⚡ Protocols Supported

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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

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🔹 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)

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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

🌟 Thanks for reading! If this post added value, a like ❤️, follow, or share would encourage me to keep creating more content.

— Latchu | Senior DevOps & Cloud Engineer

☁️ AWS | GCP | ☸️ Kubernetes | 🔐 Security | ⚡ Automation
📌 Sharing hands-on guides, best practices & real-world cloud solutions

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