A trip with Google Global Load Balancers — advanced but easy

One of the most powerful services in Cloud Computing

Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash — Our nice listener

Let’s talk about external HTTP(s) / Application Load Balancing;

It is an important Cloud Service, offered by all providers.

But the Google service is really special; it may look complex at the beginning but it is really elegant, powerful and flexible, as you will see.
Here and there we will refer to other cloud providers’ services, too.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Advantages of Load Balancers

Load Balancers are often just linked to scalability. But there is much more …

Here are the main advantages:

1. Scaling, obvious. Instance/Auto Scaling Groups let you serve apps from several VMs, but you need LB for distributing the requests. LBs are advisable with Containers and Serverless, too.
2. You can share traffic only with healthy services. Health Checks work together with the MIG’s one. MIG=Managed Instance Group.
3. You can attach security services (WAF, Bot throttling and DDos defense)