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
Geographic control over where TLS is terminated
The HTTPS and SSL Proxy load balancers terminate TLS in locations that are distributed globally, so as to minimize latency between clients and the load balancer. If you require geographic control over where TLS is terminated, you should use GCP Network Load Balancing instead, and terminate TLS on backends that are located in regions appropriate to your needs.
Flow chart
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 specific information about each load balancer.
| Load Balancer Type | Traffic Type | Preserve Client IP | Global or Regional | Load Balancing Scheme | Load Balancer Destination Ports | Proxy or Pass-Through |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| External HTTP(S) | HTTP or HTTPS | No | Global* | EXTERNAL | HTTP on 80 or 8080; HTTPS on 443 | Proxy |
| Internal HTTP(S) | HTTP or HTTPS | No | Regional | INTERNAL_MANAGED | HTTP on 80 or 8080; HTTPS on 443 | Proxy |
| SSL Proxy | TCP with SSL offload | No | Global* | EXTERNAL | 25, 43, 110, 143, 195, 443, 465, 587, 700, 993, 995, 1883, 5222 | Proxy |
| TCP Proxy | TCP without SSL offload | No | Global* | EXTERNAL | 25, 43, 110, 143, 195, 443, 465, 587, 700, 993, 995, 1883, 5222 | Proxy |
| External Network TCP/UDP | TCP or UDP | Yes | Regional | EXTERNAL | Any | Pass-through |
| Internal TCP/UDP | TCP or UDP | Yes | Regional | INTERNAL | Any | Pass-through |
*Global in Premium Tier. Regional in Standard Tier.
What's next
See Overview of Load Balancing for more information on each type of load balancer.
