Google Cloud Load Balancing

by Google Cloud

Fully managed global and regional load balancing, integrated with Cloud CDN, Cloud Armor and serverless backends.

Google’s docs organise the service into three products, each with deployment modes:

Application Load Balancers - HTTP(S), layer 7.
Proxy Network Load Balancers - TCP proxy with optional SSL offload.
Passthrough Network Load Balancers - preserve client source IP; TCP, UDP, ESP, GRE, ICMP.
Deployment modes: global external, regional external, regional internal, cross-region internal, and classic (legacy; Google recommends migrating classic Application LBs to the global external Application Load Balancer; the docs do not state a deprecation).
Traffic Director is now part of Cloud Service Mesh (docs: “Anthos Service Mesh and Traffic Director are now Cloud Service Mesh”). See Anthos for the wider rebrand.

Anycast IPs and global front end for a single-IP multi-region service; managed TLS certificates.
Health checks, connection draining, session affinity, URL maps with host/path routing.
Backends: instance groups, serverless NEGs (Cloud Run, Cloud Run functions, App Engine), hybrid NEGs, buckets.
Integrations: Cloud CDN, Cloud Armor (WAF/DDoS), IAP, Cloud Logging and Monitoring.

Use health checks that reflect application readiness, not just an open port.
Use serverless NEGs to give serverless services LB features (custom domains, CDN, Armor).

Forwarding rules, data processed, and Cloud CDN/egress where used; varies per product and scope. See https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/pricing.

Sources

Old-to-new product names (e.g. “HTTP(S) Load Balancing”, “Network Load Balancing”) were removed from the body as not shown on the fetched page.