Load balancer features

You can select the appropriate load balancer based on your application needs.

In the following tables, a checkmark indicates that a feature is supported. For more information about a feature, click the info link.

Type of load balancer

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External TCP/UDP Network	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
Proxy	info	info			SSL Proxy info TCP Proxy info
Pass-through			info	info

Protocols from the load balancer to the backends

For links to reference information, see Backend services.

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	External TCP/UDP Network
One of: HTTP (HTTP/1.1) HTTPS (HTTP/1.1) HTTP/2 (requires TLS), including gRPC
One of: TCP or UDP
One of: SSL (TLS) or TCP
ESP or ICMP			info (Preview)
WebSockets	info	info

Protocols from the clients to the load balancer

For links to reference information, see Forwarding rules.

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	External TCP/UDP Network
One of: HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, or HTTPS		(includes QUIC)
HTTP/3 (based on IETF QUIC)
One of: TCP or UDP
SSL or TCP
ESP or ICMP			info (Preview)
WebSockets	info	info

Backends

Filter this table:

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
Backends must be in one region		(Standard Tier)		(Standard Tier)
Backends can be in multiple regions		(Premium Tier)		(Premium Tier)
Load balancer can have multiple backend services and a URL map
Virtual machine backends on Compute Engine
Zonal NEGs	Using `GCE_VM_IP_PORT` type endpoints with GKE: Use standalone zonal NEGs Use Ingress for Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing	Using `GCE_VM_IP_PORT` type endpoints with GKE: Use standalone zonal NEGs Use Ingress for external HTTP(S) Load Balancing	Using `GCE_VM_IP` type endpoints with GKE: Use zonal NEGs for Internal TCP/UDP Load Balancing	Use standalone zonal NEGs
Self-managed Kubernetes and GKE
External endpoints in internet NEGs as external backends for Cloud CDN		info (Premium Tier)
Cloud Storage in backend buckets		info
Serverless backends: Cloud Run App Engine Cloud Functions		info

Health checks

For links to reference information, see Health checks.

Filter this table:

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External TCP/UDP Network	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
HTTP health checks				¹
HTTPS health checks				¹
HTTP/2 health checks				¹
SSL health checks				¹
TCP health checks				¹
Configurable health checks: Port Check intervals Timeouts Healthy and unhealthy thresholds
Configurable request path (HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2)				¹
Configurable request string or path (TCP or SSL)				¹
Configurable expected response string				¹

¹ This table documents health checks supported by backend service-based network load balancers. Target pool-based network load balancers only support legacy HTTP health checks.

IP addresses

For links to reference information, see Addresses.

Filter this table:

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
Internal IP address, accessible in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network
External IP address (global anycast)		(Premium Tier)		(Premium Tier)
External IP address (regional)		(Standard Tier)		(Standard Tier)
External IP address from Bring your own IP (BYOIP)
Multiple forwarding rules with the same IP address, each having a unique protocol and port combination
Internet accessible (including by clients that are in Google Cloud and have internet access)
Privately accessible	From same VPC network From connected network From same region		From same VPC network From connected network From any region (with global access)
Client source IP address preservation	X-Forwarded-For header	X-Forwarded-For header		In TCP Proxy header
IPv6 termination

Network topologies

Filter this table:

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External TCP/UDP Network	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
Relationships between VPC networks and load balancer backends
Backends must be in the same VPC network
Backends can be located in multiple VPC networks in the same project (the networks do not have to be connected)
Backends can use a Shared VPC network
Client access to load balancers
Google Cloud or on-premises clients must access the load balancer privately by being either in the same VPC network, in a peered VPC network, or in another network connected using Cloud VPN tunnels or Cloud Interconnect attachments (VLANs)
Google Cloud client VMs require external IP addresses or a NAT solution like Cloud NAT to access the load balancer
On-premises client VMs require internet access to access the load balancer
Google Cloud client VMs can be located in any region			If global access is enabled
Google Cloud client VMs can be located in any project (subject to other requirements in this table)

Failover

This table documents failover as supported by backend service-based network load balancers.

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External TCP/UDP Network	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
Automatic failover to healthy backends within same region
Automatic failover to healthy backends in other regions		(Premium Tier)			(Premium Tier)
Behavior when all backends are unhealthy	Returns HTTP 503	Returns HTTP 502	info (configurable)	info (configurable¹)	Traffic dropped
Configurable standby backends			info (configurable)	info (configurable²)
Connection draining on failover and failback			info (configurable)	info (configurable³)

¹ When all the backends of a target pool-based network load balancer are unhealthy, traffic is distributed among all backends. ² Target pool-based network load balancers use backup pools to support failover.

³ Target pool-based network load balancers do not support configuration of connection draining on failover/failback.

Logging and monitoring

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External TCP/UDP Network	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
Byte count metrics	info	info	info	info	info
Packet count metrics			info	info	info
Round trip time or latency metrics	info	info	info	info	info
Connection count metrics					info
HTTP request count metrics	info	info
HTTP request and response attribute logs	info	info

Session affinity

For detailed information, see Session affinity.

For links to reference information, see Backend services.

Feature	Internal TCP/UDP	External TCP/UDP Network
Headers
HTTP cookie
Generated cookie
Client IP, Destination IP (2-tuple)	¹	¹
Client IP, Destination IP, Protocol (3-tuple)	¹	¹
Client IP, Client Port, Destination IP, Destination Port, Protocol (5-tuple)	^1,2	^1,2
None (5-tuple)	³	³

¹ Setting session affinity is only meaningful if the protocol uses sessions. For example, TCP.

² If the protocol does not have a concept of ports or if the packet does not carry port information (subsequent UDP fragments, for example), then a 3-tuple hash of the Client IP, Destination IP, and protocol is used instead.

³ If the protocol has a concept of ports and the packet carries port information, then None is a 5-tuple hash. If the protocol does not have a concept of ports or if the packet does not carry port information (for example, subsequent UDP fragments), then None is a 3-tuple hash of the Client IP, Destination IP, and protocol.

Load balancing methods

For detailed information, see the Backend services overview.

For links to reference information, see Backend services.

Filter this table:

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External TCP/UDP Network	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
Balancing mode: connection
Balancing mode: rate (requests per second)
Balancing mode: backend utilization (instance group backends only)
Configurable maximum capacity per backend instance group or NEG
Circuit breaking
Percent of traffic/weight-based
Prefers region closest to client on the internet When the closest region is at capacity or isn't healthy, prefers next closest region		(Premium Tier)			(Premium Tier)
Within zone/region load balancing policy	Load balancing locality policy	Round robin in a zone	Hash-based distribution among all backends in the active pool when failover is configured, or among all backends in the region	Hash-based distribution among all backends in the active pool when failover is configured, or among all backends in the region ¹	Round robin in a zone

¹ This table documents load balancing methods supported by backend service-based network load balancers. Target pool-based network load balancers also perform hash-based distribution among all instances in the target pool or backup pool.

Routing and traffic management

For internal HTTP(S) load balancers, see the following links:

For external HTTP(S) load balancers, see the following links:

For traffic management features available with Traffic Director, see Traffic Director features: Routing and traffic management.

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
HTTP/Layer 7 request routing	Suffix, prefix, and match on: host name and path headers method cookies request parameters	Suffix, prefix, and match on: host name and path headers cookies request parameters
Fault injection	info
Configurable timeouts	info	info	info
Retries	info	info
Redirects	info	info
URI rewrites	info	info
Request/response header transformations	info
Traffic splitting	info
Traffic mirroring	info
Outlier detection	info
Retry failed requests	info

Autoscaling and autohealing

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External TCP/UDP Network	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
Managed instance group autoscaling based on load balancer serving capacity
Autohealing (native to managed instance groups and GKE)
Connection draining				¹

¹ This table documents autoscaling and autohealing features supported by backend service-based network load balancers. Target pool-based network load balancers do not support connection draining.

Security

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	External SSL Proxy and TCP Proxy
Managed certificates		info	info (SSL proxy only)
CORS	info
Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)	info	info
Google Cloud Armor		info
SSL offload			(SSL proxy only)
SSL policies (TLS version and cipher suites)		info	info (SSL proxy only)

Special features

Feature	Internal HTTP(S)	External HTTP(S)	Internal TCP/UDP	External TCP/UDP Network
Cloud CDN		info (Premium Tier)
External endpoints in internet NEGs as external backends for Cloud CDN		info (Premium Tier)
Internal DNS names	info		info
Load balancer as next hop			info
Specify network interface of a backend VM (Multi-NIC load balancing)			info
Custom request and response headers		info Geo-location information, Smoothed RTT, Client latency
Automatic Service Directory registration (Preview)	info		info
Connection tracking policy (Preview)				Tracking mode Connection persistence on unhealthy backends

What's next

To get an overview of the different load balancing solutions that are available in Google Cloud, see Load balancing overview.
To help you determine which Google Cloud load balancer best meets your needs, see Choosing a load balancer.