This document helps you determine which Google Cloud Platform load balancer best meets your needs.
About Cloud Load Balancing
Google Cloud Platform Load Balancing enables you to do the following:
- Distribute load-balanced resources in single or multiple regions
- Meet your high availability requirements
- Put your resources behind a single anycast IP address
- Scale your resources up or down with intelligent Autoscaling
- Use Cloud CDN for optimal content delivery
With Cloud Load Balancing, you can serve content as close as possible to your users, on a system that can respond to over 1 million queries per second. Cloud Load Balancing is a fully distributed, software defined, managed service. It is not instance or device based, so you do not need to manage a physical load balancing infrastructure.
Deciding on a load balancer
To decide which load balancer best suits your implementation of Google Cloud Platform, consider the following aspects of Cloud Load Balancing:
- Global versus regional load balancing
- External versus internal load balancing
- Traffic type
After you determine whether you need global or regional load balancing, external or internal load balancing, and what traffic type your load balancers must handle, use the following flow chart to determine which load balancers are available for your client, protocol, and network configuration.
Summary of Cloud load balancers
The following table provides some specifics about each load balancer.
| Load balancer | Traffic type | Global or Regional | External or Internal | External Ports for Load Balancing | Proxy or Pass-Through |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HTTP(S) | HTTP or HTTPS | Global | External | HTTP on 80 or 8080; HTTPS on 443 | Proxy |
| SSL Proxy | TCP with SSL offload | Global | External | 25, 43, 110, 143, 195, 443, 465, 587, 700, 993, 995, 1883, 5222 | Proxy |
| TCP Proxy | TCP without SSL offload. Does not preserve client IP addresses | Global | External | 25, 43, 110, 143, 195, 443, 465, 587, 700, 993, 995, 1883, 5222 | Proxy |
| Network TCP/UDP | TCP or UDP. Preserves client IP addresses. | Regional | External | Any | Pass-through |
| Internal TCP/UDP | TCP or UDP | Regional | Internal | Any | Pass-through |
| Internal HTTP(S) | HTTP or HTTPS | Regional | Internal | HTTP on 80 or 8080; HTTPS on 443 | Proxy |
What's next
See Overview of Load Balancing for more information on each type of load balancer.
