A common pattern in distributed services is load balancing, where network requests are shared across a pool of similar services based on a set of predefined rules. There are many load balancing technologies available as both managed and self-hosted services, with feature-sets that vary widely to meet specific use cases. One of the most distinguishing features of Google Cloud Platform is the availability of extremely powerful load balancers, which provide best-in-class features such as integrated health checks, automatic scaling, and global availability.
Google Cloud Platform offers three primary types of load balancers: HTTP(S) load balancers, TCP load balancers, and UDP load balancers. As we'll see, each type of load balancers offers a different feature set, and can be configured in a number of ways. All Google Cloud Platform load balancers can be categorized...
