What is Cloud Load Balancing in GCP?
Answer
Cloud Load Balancing in GCP distributes traffic across backend instances for scalability and high availability. GCP has several load balancer types. External Application Load Balancer (formerly HTTP(S) LB): global anycast IP, Layer 7, URL routing, SSL termination, CDN integration — the primary choice for web apps. External Network Load Balancer: Layer 4 (TCP/UDP), regional or global. Internal Application Load Balancer: Layer 7 for internal VPC traffic. Internal Network Load Balancer: Layer 4 for internal traffic. A unique GCP advantage: the Global External LB uses a single anycast IP that routes traffic to the nearest healthy backend globally — there is no DNS-level routing lag as with AWS Route 53 health checks. This makes global failover near-instantaneous.