Configuring Load Balancers

Load balancers distribute workload to servers running an application. In this section, we will discuss the different types of load balancers and how to configure them.

Types of Load Balancers

Load balancers can distribute load within a single region or across multiple regions. The several load balancers offered by GCP are characterized by three features:

• Global versus regional load balancing
• External versus internal load balancing
• Traffic type, such as HTTP and TCP

Global load balancers are used when an application is globally distributed.

Regional load balancers are used when resources providing an application are in a single region. There are three global load balancers:

• HTTP(S), which balances HTTP and HTTPS load across a set of backend instances
• SSL Proxy, which terminates SSL/TLS connections, which are secure socket layer connections. This type is used for non-HTTPS traffic.
• TCP Proxy, which terminates TCP sessions at the load balancer and then forwards...