Cloud Load Balancing

Google Cloud Load Balancing is a fully managed, software-defined load balancing service that distributes traffic across your backends — whether they are Compute Engine instances, GKE pods, Cloud Run services, or Cloud Functions. GCP offers a rich portfolio of load balancers for different protocols, traffic types, and scopes (global vs regional).

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Why Load Balancing?

Load balancing is essential for:

• High availability — distribute traffic so no single backend is overwhelmed.
• Scalability — handle traffic spikes by spreading load across many backends.
• Health checking — automatically remove unhealthy backends from rotation.
• Global reach — serve users from the nearest location for low latency.
• SSL termination — offload TLS processing from your application servers.

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Types of Load Balancers

GCP provides several load balancer types, each designed for specific use cases:

External HTTP(S) Load Balancer (Global)