Distribute network traffic to improve application scalability

Load Balancer distributes network traffic across groups of backend servers to improve the service capability and application availability.

As strain increases on a website or business application, eventually, a single server cannot support the full workload. To meet demand, organizations spread the workload over multiple servers. Called "load balancing," this practice prevents a single server from becoming overworked, which could cause it to slow down, drop requests, and even crash. Load balancing lets you evenly distribute network traffic to prevent failure caused by overloading a particular resource. This strategy improves the performance and availability of applications, websites, databases, and other computing resources. It also helps process user requests quickly and accurately.

load balance
01
Simple, Easy-to-Use

High availability deployment options, including the industry’s first per-app software load balancer/ADC.

02
High Security and Reliability

Server Load Balancer (SLB) provides disaster recovery at four levels for high availability. CLB and ALB support built-in Anti-DDoS services to ensure business security. In addition, you can integrate ALB with WAF in the console to ensure security at the application layer.

03
Cloud-Native

Gcloud LB support cloud-native networks.Gcloud LB is integrated with other cloud-native services, such as Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), Serverless App Engine (SAE), and Kubernetes, and functions as a cloud-native gateway to distribute inbound network traffic.

04
World-Class Technical Support

Get direct-access technical support in-region on first contact with highly experienced network engineers with application specific competencies.

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Load balancing lets you evenly distribute network traffic to prevent failure caused by overloading a particular resource.

Features

Cloud load balancing is packed with helpful and useful features. It maintains application resilience, accelerates performance, and protects cloud applications and services from unprecedented failures.

Seamless Auto scaling

With the help of cloud load balancers, you can auto scale your applications effectively and manage a surge or dip in the workload as needed. This feature is entirely cost-effective because it reduces resource consumption as the cloud application and server requests decrease. The cloud load balancer permits the auto scaler to scale up or scale down according to the measured load.

Supports Several Protocols

Since cloud load balancing software is specifically curated to serve cloud applications, it supports many latest protocols, including HTTP/2, TCP, and UDP load balancing.

Active health checks

Cloud load balancers are programmed to perform periodic health checks by sending specific health check requests to each cloud application’s servers. This is done to monitor the health of the upstream servers. At the end of the health check, the load balancer also verifies the response.

Peak performance during high traffic

Regardless of the number of requests or traffic on your cloud application, cloud load balancing providers ensure that the workload is evenly distributed in real time.

Benefits

If your organization runs high-traffic websites and applications or databases that receive a lot of queries, load balancing delivers multiple benefits by optimizing resource use, data delivery, and response time. In high-traffic environments, load balancing is what makes user requests go smoothly and accurately. They spare users the frustration of wrangling with unresponsive applications and resources.

Other benefits of load balancing include the following

High Performing Applications

With the right load balancing providers, you can scale your services and ensure that increased traffic doesn’t lower efficiency. Load balancers step in and distribute the workload to maintain high performance at all times.

Ability to Handle Traffic Surges

Rather than employing several IT professionals to counteract traffic surges, cloud load balancers manage server requests so that each server runs at an efficient and high-performing capacity. This even distribution allows servers to achieve optimum results in the shortest possible response time.

Flexibility

Cloud load balancers route traffic and distribute it among several servers and network units. As a result, even if a specific node in a chain of linked nodes can’t take the workload, the load is immediately transported to another active node. With cloud load balancing, application traffic is managed with ease and flexibility.

Cost-Effectiveness

When companies use an efficient cloud load balancing provider, they deliver better cloud service performances to all of their clients, making them reliable in the long run. A bonus is that it’s all achieved at a significantly lower cost of ownership.
Because cloud load balancers run on the cloud, small businesses, startups, and medium-sized enterprises can use their services.

Reliability and Increased Scalability

When scalability is a concern, cloud load balancers easily respond to traffic surges.When a cloud service crashes, cloud load balancers are quite efficient at redirecting traffic from the crashed resource, shifting the workload to another resource within the cloud environment.

Load Balancing for Scale

Scaling traffic is the most common use case for a Load Balancer. Often times scaling is discussed in vertical and horizontal terms. Vertical scaling is basically moving your application to a more powerful server to meet increasing performance demands. Horizontal scaling is distributing your traffic among multiple servers to share the load. Load Balancers facilitate horizontal scaling.

A side benefit of horizontal scaling with load balancers is the chance to increase your service’s reliability. We’ll talk about that next.

High Availability

High availability is a term that describes efforts to decrease downtime and increase system reliability. This is often addressed by improving performance and eliminating single points of failure.
A Load Balancer can increase availability by performing repeated health checks on your backend servers and automatically removing failed servers from the pool.

Flexibility

Migrating old, hardware-based infrastructures to cloud-based environments allows agile development and the ability to upgrade and refine features easily.

Less Expensive

Deploying software LB is much less expensive than continuously buying hardware every time a change is made.

Frequently Asked Questions
The GcloudLoad Balancer service does not support UDP. It supports only TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS.
Yes, GcloudLoad Balancing guarantees a monthly availability of at least 99.99% for your load balancers.
An Application Load Balancer supports targets with any operating system currently supported by the GCloud.
You can perform load balancing for the following TCP ports: 1-65535
Yes, you can add listeners for HTTP port 80 and HTTPS port 443 to a single Application Load Balancer.
We bill Load Balancers the same way as servers. They have both a monthly price cap and a price per hour.