Implementing cloud load balancing for compute engine

Module 1: Introduction to Cloud Load Balancing

1.1 Overview of Load Balancing Concepts

Cloud load balancing in Compute Engine distributes incoming network traffic across multiple virtual machine (VM) instances. This ensures high availability and scalability of your applications.

Overview of Load Balancing Concepts:

At a high level, load balancing involves these key components:

• Health Checks: Regularly check the health of backend VMs. Unhealthy instances are automatically removed from serving traffic.

  • Example: A health check might send an HTTP request to each VM on port 80 every 5 seconds. If a VM doesn’t respond with a 200 OK within 3 seconds, it’s considered unhealthy.

• Backend Services: Define groups of backend VMs that serve the same traffic. Configure parameters like port, health check, and capacity scaling.

  • Example: A backend service named “web-servers” might include three VMs (web-vm-1, web-vm-2, web-vm-3) all listening on port 80. The backend service utilizes the health check to ensure only healthy servers receive traffic.

• Frontend Configuration (Forwarding Rules): Define how incoming traffic is routed to the backend service. This includes specifying the IP address and port the load balancer listens on.

  • Example: A forwarding rule might be set up to listen on IP address 203.0.113.1 (the load balancer’s external IP) on port 80 and forward all incoming traffic to the “web-servers” backend service.

• Load Balancing Algorithms: Determine how traffic is distributed among healthy backend VMs. Common algorithms include round robin (traffic is distributed sequentially), least connections (traffic is sent to the VM with the fewest active connections), and hash-based (traffic is directed to the same VM based on a client IP or other criteria).

  • Example: Using round robin, the first request might go to web-vm-1, the second to web-vm-2, the third to web-vm-3, and then back to web-vm-1, and so on.

• Session Affinity (Sticky Sessions): Routes all requests from a specific user or client to the same backend VM. This is useful for applications that require session state.

  • Example: If a user establishes a session with web-vm-2, all subsequent requests from that user will be directed to web-vm-2 until the session expires or the VM becomes unhealthy.

The load balancer sits in front of your VMs and acts as a single point of contact for clients. It handles routing traffic intelligently to ensure your application remains available and performs well, even during periods of high traffic.

1.2 Benefits of Using Cloud Load Balancing

1.3 Types of Load Balancers on Google Cloud

Module 2: Understanding Compute Engine

2.1 Compute Engine Instance Types

2.2 Regions and Zones in Compute Engine

2.3 Creating and Managing Compute Engine Instances

Module 3: Learn how to create and deploy virtual machines

3.1 Creating a VM Instance using the Google Cloud Console

3.2 Creating a VM Instance using gcloud CLI

3.3 Deploying Applications on Virtual Machines

Module 4: Configuring Network Load Balancers

4.1 Creating a Network Load Balancer

4.2 Configuring Health Checks for Network Load Balancers

4.3 Managing Backend Services for Network Load Balancers

Module 5: Configuring Application Load Balancers

5.1 Creating an Application Load Balancer

5.2 Configuring Health Checks for Application Load Balancers

5.3 Managing Backend Services for Application Load Balancers

5.4 SSL Certificates and HTTPS Configuration

Module 6: Load Balancing Algorithms and Session Affinity

6.1 Round Robin Load Balancing

6.2 Least Connections Load Balancing

6.3 Session Affinity (Cookie Based)

Module 7: Monitoring and Logging Load Balancers

7.1 Using Google Cloud Monitoring for Load Balancers

7.2 Accessing Load Balancer Logs

7.3 Troubleshooting Load Balancer Issues

Module 8: Best Practices and Cost Optimization

8.1 Choosing the Right Load Balancer Type

8.2 Optimizing Health Check Configuration

8.3 Cost Management Strategies for Load Balancing