Network load balancing
When an application outgrows a single Compute Engine VM size, even of the largest type, it is time to use managed instance groups and load balancers to handle larger amounts of traffic.
Refer to Figure 4.67 in Chapter 4, where this concept was initially introduced. A managed instance group is a set of identical Compute Engine instances deployed from a template in a zone or zones in a region. Thanks to the autoscaling feature, the group can dynamically grow or shrink depending on the load. When a health check detects that one of the instances has failed, it is recreated. When combined with a load balancer, a managed instance group can work as the backend of an application. The load balancer’s role is, in this case, to distribute traffic to instances based on conditions such as CPU utilization or the number of requests.
A managed instance group is just one of the supported backend types for a load balancer in Google Cloud. Other possible backend workloads...
