Cloud Load Balancing supports load-balancing traffic to endpoints that extend beyond Google Cloud, such as on-premises data centers and other public clouds that you can use hybrid connectivity to reach.
A hybrid strategy is a pragmatic solution for you to adapt to changing market demands and incrementally modernize your applications. This could be a temporary hybrid deployment to enable migration to a modern cloud-based solution or a permanent fixture of your organization's IT infrastructure.
Setting up hybrid load balancing also lets you bring the benefits of Cloud Load Balancing's networking capabilities to services running on your existing infrastructure outside of Google Cloud.
Hybrid load balancing is supported on the following Google Cloud load balancers:
- External Application Load Balancers: global external Application Load Balancers, classic Application Load Balancers, and regional external Application Load Balancers
- Internal Application Load Balancers: cross-region internal Application Load Balancers and regional internal Application Load Balancers
- External proxy Network Load Balancers: global external proxy Network Load Balancers, classic proxy Network Load Balancers, and regional external proxy Network Load Balancers
- Internal proxy Network Load Balancers: regional internal proxy Network Load Balancers and cross-region internal proxy Network Load Balancers
On-premises and other cloud services are treated like any other
Cloud Load Balancing backend. The key difference is that you use a
hybrid connectivity NEG to configure the endpoints of these backends. The
endpoints must be valid IP:port combinations that your load balancer can reach
by using hybrid connectivity products such as
Cloud VPN,
Cloud Interconnect,
or Router appliance
VMs.
Use-case: Routing traffic to an on-premises location or another cloud
The simplest use case for using hybrid NEGs is routing traffic from a Google Cloud load balancer to an on-premises location or to another cloud environment. Clients can originate traffic either from the public internet, from within Google Cloud, or from an on-premises client.
Public clients
You can use an external Application Load Balancer with a hybrid NEG backend to route traffic from external clients to a backend on-premises or in another cloud network. You can also enable the following value-added networking capabilities for your services on-premises or in other cloud networks:
With the global external Application Load Balancer and classic Application Load Balancer, you can:
- Use Google's global edge infrastructure to terminate user connections closer to the user, thus decreasing latency.
- Protect your service with Google Cloud Armor, an edge DDoS defense/WAF security product available to all services accessed through an external Application Load Balancer.
- Enable your service to optimize delivery using Cloud CDN. With Cloud CDN, you can cache content close to your users. Cloud CDN provides capabilities like cache invalidation and Cloud CDN signed URLs.