Cloud Load Balancing

Application Load Balancers can balance HTTP and HTTPS traffic across multiple backend instances, across multiple regions. Your entire app is available using a single global IP address, resulting in a simplified DNS setup. Application Load Balancers are scalable, fault-tolerant, require no pre-warming, and are content-based. For HTTPS traffic, they also provide SSL termination and load balancing.

Cloud Logging for load balancing logs all the load balancing requests sent to your load balancer. These logs can be used for debugging as well as analyzing your user traffic. You can view request logs and export them to Cloud Storage, BigQuery, or Pub/Sub for analysis.

Network Load Balancers are Layer 4 load balancers that can distribute traffic to back ends located either in a single region or across multiple regions. These load balancers are scalable, don't require pre-warming, and use health checks to help ensure that only healthy instances receive traffic. Available Network Load Balancers: Proxy Network Load Balancers and Passthrough Network Load Balancers.

Autoscaling helps your applications gracefully handle increases in traffic and reduces cost when the need for resources is lower. You just define the autoscaling policy and the autoscaler performs automatic scaling based on the measured load. No pre-warming required—go from zero to full throttle in seconds.

SSL offload enables you to centrally manage SSL certificates and decryption. You can enable encryption between your load balancing layer and backends to ensure the highest level of security, with some additional overhead for processing on backends.

Health checks ensure that new connections are only load balanced to healthy backends that are up and ready to receive them. High fidelity health checks ensure that the probes mimic actual traffic to backends.

Cloud Load Balancing also includes advanced support features, such as IPv6 global load balancing, WebSockets, user-defined request headers, and protocol forwarding for private VIPs. 

Cloud Load Balancing session affinity provides the ability to direct and stick user traffic to specific backend instances.

Enable Cloud CDN for your Application Load Balancers to optimize application delivery for your users with a single checkbox.

Passthrough Network Load Balancers can spread UDP traffic over a pool of instances within a Compute Engine region. These load balancers are scalable, don't require pre-warming, and use health checks to help ensure that only healthy instances receive traffic.

Service Extensions provide programmability and extensibility on load balancing data paths. Service Extensions callouts enable gRPC calls to user-managed services during data processing, while Service Extensions plugins allow the insertion of custom code into the networking data path using WebAssembly (Wasm).

Google Cloud Armor security policies enable you to rate-limit or redirect requests to your Application or Network Load Balancers at the Google Cloud edge, as close as possible to the source of incoming traffic.