Google Cloud

High performance, scalable load balancing on Google Cloud

A fully managed service that intelligently distributes traffic across your apps for high performance and resilience, scaling seamlessly from zero to millions of users.

Features

HTTP(S) 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 enable content-based load balancing. For HTTPS traffic, they provide SSL termination and load balancing.

TCP/SSL/UDP load balancing

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 and passthrough.

SSL offload

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.

Cloud CDN

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

Google Cloud Armor

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.

Cloud Logging

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.

Extensibility and programmability

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).

Effortless autoscaling

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.

High-fidelity health checks

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.

Advanced feature support

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.

Affinity

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

How It Works

A single IP address advertises your service globally from Google's network edge. As requests arrive, the system intelligently routes traffic to the optimal backend—VM, container, or serverless—based on health, proximity, and capacity to ensure the lowest latency path.

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Common Uses

Global application delivery

Learning resources

Modern and AI applications

Learning resources

Hybrid and multicloud networking

Learning resources

Secure and scale application delivery

Learning resources

Pricing

ItemPricing details

Load balancing and forwarding rules

Internal Application Load Balancer

Authorization policy charges

Compute Engine self-managed TSL certificates

Learn more about SSL certificate pricing.

Load balancing and forwarding rules

Pricing details

Internal Application Load Balancer

Pricing details

Authorization policy charges

Pricing details

Compute Engine self-managed TSL certificates

Pricing details

Pricing calculator

Estimate your monthly charges.

Custom Quote

Request a quote.

Deploy a global hybrid app

Architect a global front end

Hybrid connectivity endpoint

Securely connect across clouds

Optimize routing for AI/ML

Edge performance

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