Choosing a load balancer

1. Choosing a load balancer

Now that we've discussed all the different load balancing services within Google Cloud, let me help you determine which load balancer best meets your needs. To determine which Cloud Load Balancing product to use, you must first determine what traffic type your load balancers must handle. As a general rule, you'd choose an Application Load Balancer when you need a flexible feature set for your applications with HTTP(S) traffic. You'd choose a proxy Network Load Balancer to implement TLS offload, TCP proxy, or support for external load balancing to backends in multiple regions. You'd choose a passthrough Network Load Balancer to preserve client source IP addresses, avoid the overhead of proxies, and to support additional protocols like UDP, ESP, and ICMP, or if you need to expose client IP addresses to your applications. You can further narrow down your choices depending on your application's requirements: whether your application is external, (internet-facing), or internal, and whether you need backends deployed globally, or regionally. If you prefer a table over a flow chart, we recommend this summary table. The load-balancing scheme is an attribute on the forwarding rule and the backend service of a load balancer and indicates whether the load balancer can be used for internal or external traffic. The term MANAGED in the load-balancing scheme indicates that the load balancer is implemented as a managed service either on Google Front Ends or on the open source Envoy proxy. In a load-balancing scheme that is MANAGED, requests are routed either to the Google Front End or to the Envoy proxy. For more information on Network Service Tiers, refer to the documentation link in the Course Resources.

2. Let's practice!

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