Connect from anywhere: Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancers are now globally accessible
Adam Michelson
Group Product Manager, Google Cloud
Anusheel Pareek
Product Manager, Google Cloud
We’re excited to announce the General Availability of global access with Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancer and Internal TCP Proxy Load Balancer. This feature will allow private clients to access your load balancer’s IP address from all Google Cloud regions.
Securely access services from clients across all cloud regions
Global access allows clients from any region to send traffic to services deployed in a specific region via the load balancer. Your services can be deployed on Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, on-premises or in other public clouds, and can communicate with clients across the globe using this feature with the Internal HTTP(S) or TCP proxy Load Balancers.
Clients running on-premises or on other clouds can access globally distributed Google Cloud services
Global access allows you to send traffic from your on-premise or other cloud clients to your services in any Google Cloud region. This means that you do not need to set up separate VPN tunnels or interconnect attachments for each region where your services are located. Instead, you can use a single global access configuration to ensure that your clients can always reach your services, no matter where they are hosted within Google Cloud. This simplifies network management and eliminates the need to configure multiple complex and time-consuming per-region VPN tunnels or interconnect attachments.
Furthermore, enterprises migrating their operations to the cloud often have multiple on-prem data centers located in different parts of the world. By leveraging global access, these organizations can ensure that their Google Cloud services are accessible from all their data centers worldwide.
Native support with GKE
We natively support global access with GKE for Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancer, using the Kubernetes Gateway API and our GKE Gateway controller. If you want to make your services running in GKE available to other regions, you can attach a Policy to your Gateway that will set the global access attribute on the underlying load balancer.
Configuring global access
Global access is fully compatible with all other features of internal load balancers. Enabling global access is simple and can be done with just one click (see GUI image below) or a line of configuration code. For detailed instructions on how to configure global access see the links below:
