Setting up Cloud CDN with a managed instance group

Cloud CDN leverages Google Cloud global external HTTP(S) load balancers to provide routing, health checking, and Anycast IP support. Global external HTTP(S) load balancers can have multiple backend instance types, and you can choose which backends (or origins) to enable Cloud CDN for.

This setup guide shows you how to create a simple external HTTP load balancer with Cloud CDN enabled. The load balancer has the following resources:

• The default Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network
• A Compute Engine managed instance group
• A default URL map
• A reserved external IP address

For a simple external HTTPS load balancer with TLS termination, see Setting up a simple external HTTPS load balancer.

For a content-based, multi-region example that includes IPv6 and SSL certificate setup, see Setting up a multi-region, content-based external HTTPS load balancer.

For general concepts, see the External HTTP(S) Load Balancing overview.

If you're using GKE, the load balancer is typically configured by the Kubernetes Ingress controller. For more information, see Configuring Ingress for external load balancing.

Note: If you already have an external HTTP(S) load balancer with an instance group (or groups), you can skip to the Enabling Cloud CDN section of this guide.

Topology

In this guide, you create the configuration that is illustrated in the following diagram.

Simple HTTP Load Balancing (click to enlarge)

The sequence of events in the diagram is as follows:

1. A client sends a content request to the external IPv4 address defined in the forwarding rule.
2. The load balancer checks whether the request can be served from cache. If so, the load balancer serves the requested content out of cache. If not, processing continues.
3. The forwarding rule directs the request to the target HTTP proxy.
4. The target proxy uses the rule in the URL map to determine that the single backend service receives all requests.
5. The load balancer determines that the backend service has only one instance group and directs the request to a virtual machine (VM) instance in that group.
6. The VM serves the content requested by the user.

Simple HTTP(S) Load Balancing with Cloud CDN enabled (click to enlarge)

Permissions

To complete the steps in this guide, you must have permission to create Compute Engine instances, firewall rules, and reserved IP addresses in a project. You must have either a project owner or editor role, or you must have the following Compute Engine IAM roles.

Task	Required role
Create instances	Instance Admin
Add and remove firewall rules	Security Admin
Create load balancer components	Network Admin
Create a project (optional)	Project Creator

For more information, see the following guides:

• Access control
• Cloud IAM Conditions

Creating a managed instance group

To set up a load balancer with a Compute Engine backend, your VMs need to be in an instance group. This guide describes how to create a managed instance group with Linux VMs that have Apache running, and then set up load balancing.

The managed instance group provides VMs running the backend servers of an external HTTP load balancer. For demonstration purposes, backends serve their own hostnames.

Console

1. In the Google Cloud Console, go to the Instance groups page.

   Go to the Instance groups page

2. Click Create instance group.
3. On the left, choose New managed instance group.
4. For Name, enter lb-backend-example.
5. Under Location, select Single zone.
6. For Region, select your preferred region. This example uses us-east1.
7. For Zone, select us-east1-b.
8. Under Instance template, select Create a new instance template.
9. For Name, enter lb-backend-template.
10. Ensure that the Boot disk is set to a Debian image, such as Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch). These instructions use commands that are only available on Debian, such as apt-get.

11. Under Management, security, disks, networking, sole tenancy, on the Management tab, insert the following script into the Startup script field.

    #! /bin/bash
    apt-get update
    apt-get install apache2 -y
    a2ensite default-ssl
    a2enmod ssl
    vm_hostname="$(curl -H "Metadata-Flavor:Google" \
    http://169.254.169.254/computeMetadata/v1/instance/name)"
    echo "Page served from: $vm_hostname" | \
    tee /var/www/html/index.html
    

12. On the Networking tab, add the network tags: allow-health-check

13. Click Save and continue.

14. Under Autoscaling mode, select Don't autoscale.

15. Under Number of instances, enter 2.

16. To create the new instance group, click Create.

Note: Because the external HTTP(S) load balancer is a proxy, you don't need to select Allow HTTP traffic under Firewall. In Configuring a firewall rule, you create the only necessary firewall rule for this load balancer.

gcloud

1. Create the template.

   gcloud compute instance-templates create lb-backend-template \
      --region=us-east1 \
      --network=default \
      --subnet=default \
      --tags=allow-health-check \
      --image-family=debian-9 \
      --image-project=debian-cloud \
      --metadata=startup-script='#! /bin/bash
        apt-get update
        apt-get install apache2 -y
        a2ensite default-ssl
        a2enmod ssl
        vm_hostname="$(curl -H "Metadata-Flavor:Google" \
        http://169.254.169.254/computeMetadata/v1/instance/name)"
        echo "Page served from: $vm_hostname" | \
        tee /var/www/html/index.html
        systemctl restart apache2'
   

2. Create the managed instance group based on the template.

   gcloud compute instance-groups managed create lb-backend-example \
      --template=lb-backend-template --size=2 --zone=us-east1-b
   

Configuring a firewall rule

In this example, you create the fw-allow-health-check firewall rule. This is an ingress rule that allows traffic from the Google Cloud health checking systems (130.211.0.0/22 and 35.191.0.0/16). This example uses the target tag allow-health-check to identify the VMs.

Console

1. In the Google Cloud Console, go to the Firewall page.

   Go to the Firewall page

2. Click Create firewall rule to create the second firewall rule.
3. For Name, enter fw-allow-health-check.
4. Under Network, select Default.
5. Under Targets, select Specified target tags.
6. Populate the Target tags field with allow-health-check.
7. Set Source filter to IP ranges.
8. Set Source IP ranges to 130.211.0.0/22 and 35.191.0.0/16.
9. Under Protocols and ports, select Specified protocols and ports.
10. Select the tcp checkbox, and then type 80 for the port numbers.
11. Click Create.

gcloud

gcloud compute firewall-rules create fw-allow-health-check \
    --network=default \
    --action=allow \
    --direction=ingress \
    --source-ranges=130.211.0.0/22,35.191.0.0/16 \
    --target-tags=allow-health-check \
    --rules=tcp

Reserving an external IP address

Now that your instances are up and running, set up a global static external IP address that your customers use to reach your load balancer.

Console

1. In the Google Cloud Console, go to the External IP addresses page.

   Go to the External IP addresses page

2. To reserve an IPv4 address, click Reserve static address.
3. For Name, enter lb-ipv4-1.
4. Set Network Service Tier to Premium.
5. Set IP version to IPv4.
6. Set Type to Global.
7. Click Reserve.

gcloud

gcloud compute addresses create lb-ipv4-1 \
    --ip-version=IPV4 \
    --global

Note the IPv4 address that was reserved:

gcloud compute addresses describe lb-ipv4-1 \
    --format="get(address)" \
    --global

Setting up the load balancer

Console

1. In the Google Cloud Console, go to the Load balancing page.

   Go to the Load balancing page

2. Click Create load balancer.
3. Under HTTP(S) Load Balancing, click Start configuration.
4. Select From Internet to my VMs, and then click Continue.
5. For the load balancer Name, enter web-map-http.
6. Click Backend configuration.
   1. Under Create or select backend services & backend buckets, select Backend services > Create a backend service.
   2. Add a name for your backend service, such as web-backend-service.
   3. Under Protocol, select HTTP.
   4. In Backends > New backend > Instance group, select your instance group, lb-backend-example.
   5. Retain the other default settings.
   6. Under Health check, select Create a health check, and then add a name for your health check, such as http-basic-check.
   7. Set the protocol to HTTP, and then click Save and continue.
   8. Select Enable Cloud CDN.
   9. Retain the other default settings.
   10. Click Create.
7. In Host and path rules, retain the default settings.
8. In Frontend configuration, use the following values:
1. Set Protocol to HTTP.
2. Set IP address to lb-ipv4-1, which you created earlier.
3. Ensure that Port is set to 80 to allow HTTP traffic.
4. Click Done.
9. Click Review and finalize.
10. When you finish configuring the load balancer, click Create.
11. Wait for the load balancer to be created.
12. Click the name of the load balancer.
13. On the Load balancer details screen, note the IP:Port for your load balancer.

gcloud

1. Create a health check.

       gcloud compute health-checks create http http-basic-check \
           --port 80
       

2. Create a backend service.

       gcloud compute backend-services create web-backend-service \
           --protocol HTTP \
           --health-checks http-basic-check \
           --global
       

3. Add your instance group as the backend to the backend service.

       gcloud compute backend-services add-backend web-backend-service \
           --instance-group=lb-backend-example \
           --instance-group-zone=us-east1-b \
           --global
       

4. Create a URL map to route the incoming requests to the default backend service.

       gcloud compute url-maps create web-map-http \
           --default-service web-backend-service
       

5. Create a target HTTP proxy to route requests to your URL map.

       gcloud compute target-http-proxies create http-lb-proxy \
           --url-map web-map-http
       

6. Create a global forwarding rule to route incoming requests to the proxy.

       gcloud compute forwarding-rules create http-content-rule \
           --address=lb-ipv4-1\
           --global \
           --target-http-proxy=http-lb-proxy \
           --ports=80
       

Enabling Cloud CDN

If you didn't already enable Cloud CDN when you created your backend service, you can do this now by updating the backend service:

gcloud compute backend-services update-backend web-backend-service \
    --enable-cdn

Important: For Cloud CDN to cache responses from your backend, you need to set valid caching directives on each response. For example, Cache-Control: max-age=3600, public.

You can read more about the cache directives that Cloud CDN understands, and what is not cached by Cloud CDN, in the caching overview.

Sending traffic to your instances

Now that the load balancing service is running, you can send traffic to the forwarding rule and watch the traffic be dispersed to different instances.

Console

1. In the Google Cloud Console, go to the Load balancing page.

   Go to the Load balancing page

2. Click the load balancer that you just created.
3. In the Backend section, confirm that the VMs are healthy. The Healthy column should be populated, indicating that both VMs are healthy (2/2). If you see otherwise, first try reloading the page. It can take a few moments for the Cloud Console to indicate that the VMs are healthy. If the backends do not appear healthy after a few minutes, review the firewall configuration and the network tag assigned to your backend VMs.
4. After the Cloud Console shows that the backend instances are healthy, you can test your load balancer using a web browser by going to http://IP_ADDRESS. Replace IP_ADDRESS with the load balancer's IP address.
5. Your browser should render a page with content showing the name of the instance that served the page, along with its zone (for example, Page served from: lb-backend-example-xxxx). If your browser doesn't render this page, review the configuration settings in this guide.

Disabling Cloud CDN

Console

To disable Cloud CDN for a single backend service, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud Console, go to the Cloud CDN page.

   Go to the Cloud CDN page

2. On the right side of the origin row, click Menu and then select Edit.
3. Clear the checkboxes of any backend services that you want to stop from using Cloud CDN.
4. Click Update.

To turn off Cloud CDN for all backend services for an origin, do the following:

1. In the Cloud Console, go to the Cloud CDN page.

   Go to the Cloud CDN page

2. On the right side of the origin row, click Menu and then select Remove.
3. To confirm, click Remove.

gcloud

gcloud compute backend-services update BACKEND_SERVICE_NAME \
    --no-enable-cdn

Disabling Cloud CDN does not invalidate or purge caches. If you disable and then re-enable Cloud CDN, most or all of your cached content might still be cached. To prevent content from being served from cache, you must invalidate that content.

What's next

• To learn about what content is cached, see the Caching overview.
• To use Cloud CDN in GKE, see Ingress features.
• To check whether Cloud CDN is serving responses from cache, see Viewing logs.
• To find information about common problems and solutions, see Troubleshooting.
• To learn how Cloud CDN works, see the Cloud CDN overview.