Professional Cloud ArchitectManage and provision solution infrastructureMedium
A company is expanding its operations globally and needs to deploy a new web application that serves customers in North America, Europe, and Asia. The application must provide low-latency access to users in all regions and be highly available. The back-end services are deployed as microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters in each region. Which global load balancing solution should they implement to direct user traffic to the nearest healthy GKE cluster?
- ANetwork Load Balancing
- BInternal HTTP(S) Load Balancing
- CExternal HTTP(S) Load Balancing with global external IP
- DSSL Proxy Load Balancing
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. External HTTP(S) Load Balancing with global external IP
External HTTP(S) Load Balancing with a global external IP address is designed for global applications, providing a single IP endpoint that automatically routes user traffic to the closest healthy backend (GKE cluster in this case), ensuring low latency and high availability across regions.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Network Load Balancing is a regional, pass-through load balancer for TCP/UDP traffic, not application-layer HTTP(S) and does not provide global routing.
- B. Internal HTTP(S) Load Balancing is for internal traffic within a VPC network, not external global users.
- D. SSL Proxy Load Balancing handles SSL termination globally but is typically used for non-HTTP(S) traffic or specific SSL offloading use cases, and doesn't inherently provide the global intelligent routing for HTTP(S) applications like the External HTTP(S) Load Balancer.
External HTTP(S) Load Balancing (Global)
A global, application-layer (Layer 7) load balancer that distributes HTTP(S) traffic to backends across multiple regions, providing low latency and high availability.
- Uses a single global IP address.
- Directs traffic to the nearest healthy backend.
- Supports advanced traffic management features (e.g., URL maps, path-based routing).
Memory trick: External HTTP(S) makes global apps fast and stable.