A few months ago, Google unveiled HTTP load balancing for Google Cloud Platform. It was made available to certain customers who signed up for it, but it’s now open for preview to all customers.
HTTP load balancing has been added to the Developers Console, and there are also some new commands in gcloud.
Google says many customers have already signed up, and have been using HTTP load balancing. These are the things it can do, as listed by the company:
- load balance HTTP-based traffic over instances in multiple Compute Engine regions
- intelligently select the optimal path between your users and your instances by using network proximity and backend capacity information,
- expose your entire app via a single global external IP address, resulting in much simplified DNS setup,
- filter out TCP SYN flood attacks,
- route user requests to different backend groups based on host and URL path prefix, and
- allow you to administer and monitor via RESTful API, Cloud SDK and the newly added UI in Developers Console.
The offering is built on the same frontend infrastructure as Google’s own services, including search, Gmail, and YouTube.
Image via Google
