Google Compute Engine : Load Balancer In Action

This week I introduced Google Cloud Platform to a select group of individuals. I wanted to show them the “Operational Simplicity” of the platform vis-a-vis the other IaaS providers.

I read an excellent book on Google Compute Engine (GCE) recently, which is a great tutorial on the various services available in GCE. I strongly recommend the book. One of the examples there was of a Load Balancer in Action, where the authors demonstrated spinning up a couple of Virtual Instances, setting them up with a Apache Web Server and then bringing them down and up again to demonstrate how the Load Balancer works. I thought that would be a great demo to show and full marks to the authors, I just went through the script but I did a little bit more, which I want to share with everyone.

Note: The demo script by the way can be done entirely from the command line / terminal — using the gcloud tool. So, while I do not have the permission to produce those set of instructions verbatim from the book, I think you will get the picture if you are familiar with the basic gcloud commands to:

• create/list instances
• create/list firewall rules
• create/list target pools
• create/list forwarding rules.

What I would like to share is a series of presentation slides that capture this demo visually, so that it is easy to explain to the audience what is going on.

You can view/download the presentation slides here too.

Feel free to use the slides as you want and if you give some twists to this demo, let me know — I would like to learn from it.

P.S: I have not coined the term “Operational Simplicity” but read this recently in the following article, which sums up the essence of Google Cloud Platform very well.