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google-cloud-platformarchitecturehigh-availabilitygoogle-cloud-load-balancer

Is Google Cloud Load Balancer a single point of failure ? Can we have a standby replica?

We are doing an HA deployment of our application in GCP for evaluation. The rough architecture is similar toenter image description here (Image courtesy : Google cloud)

The Global load balancer itself appears a single point of failure.

How can we achieve this in GCP.

  1. Couldn't find any HA configuration for Cloud Load balancer in GCP console.
  2. Googling takes me to provision for backend services.Not what I am looking for.

Can you please share your thoughts.

Solution

  • The global load balancer is not a device, and not a single point of failure.

    It's a logical/virtual entity that delivers the service using globally-distributed hardware and anycast IP routing... so if my browser and your browser are connecting to "the same" balancer (at the same IP address), then there's a very high probability that we aren't communicating with the same physical hardware, and a good possibility that those two different physical devices we're talking to are not even in the same physical location.

    Cloud Load Balancing is a fully distributed, software-defined, managed service for all your traffic. It is not an instance or device based solution, so you won’t be locked into physical load balancing infrastructure or face the HA, scale and management challenges inherent in instance based LBs.

    https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/

    There isn't any configuration option for this, because it's an intrinsic part of the design of the service.