GCP Basics · Module 04

Load Balancing & Hybrid – Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud Armor, CDN, VPN and IAP

Pick the right Cloud Load Balancing product, protect it with Cloud Armor, cache at the edge with Cloud CDN, connect on-premises networks with HA VPN or Interconnect, and give admins access without public IPs through Identity-Aware Proxy.

Practice interactively →

What you will learn

• Choose between Application and Network load balancers, global or regional, external or internal
• Build a global external Application Load Balancer and protect it with Cloud Armor
• Enable and invalidate Cloud CDN caching
• Compare HA VPN, Dedicated and Partner Interconnect
• Use IAP for web apps and for SSH/RDP without external IPs

Lessons

1. Cloud Load Balancing: Types and Building Blocks

   Application Load Balancers work at layer 7 and Network Load Balancers at layer 4; choose global or regional, external or internal, and wire forwarding rule → proxy → URL map → backend service → backends.

2. External Application Load Balancer and Cloud Armor

   Terminate TLS with managed certificates on a global external Application Load Balancer, and attach Cloud Armor security policies for WAF rules, IP and geo filtering and rate limiting.

3. Cloud CDN

   Cloud CDN caches content at Google’s edge for external Application Load Balancers; control it with cache modes, TTLs and cache keys, and remove stale content with invalidations or versioned URLs.

4. Cloud VPN and Cloud Interconnect

   HA VPN gives encrypted tunnels over the Internet with a 99.99% SLA; Dedicated and Partner Interconnect give private, high-bandwidth links; Cloud Router exchanges routes with BGP for all of them.

5. Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)

   IAP checks Google identity and context before letting users reach web apps, and tunnels SSH/RDP to VMs with no external IP, replacing bastion hosts and VPNs for admin access.