We continue to make improvements to Google Cloud Platform and deliver new and better capabilities to enable our developers to add resilience, performance and robustness to their applications on Google Compute Engine.

In June, we unveiled Google’s HTTP load balancing to the world. Since then, many Cloud Platform customers have signed up and experienced its performance. Customers who are using it for their production site experience a significant performance benefit. With countless hours of real-world testing and feedback from you, we are now ready to open it for preview to all customers. As part of the launch, we have added HTTP load balancing to the Developers Console and also added some new commands in gcloud to let you easily administer and monitor HTTP load balancing.

Built on top of the same frontend infrastructure as Google’s own services such as search, Gmail and YouTube, Google’s HTTP load balancing can:

  • load balance HTTP-based traffic over instances in multiple Compute Engine regions
  • intelligently select the optimal path between your users and your instances by using network proximity and backend capacity information,
  • expose your entire app via a single global external IP address, resulting in much simplified DNS setup,
  • filter out TCP SYN flood attacks,
  • route user requests to different backend groups based on host and URL path prefix, and
  • allow you to administer and monitor via RESTful API, Cloud SDK and the newly added UI in Developers Console.

Please review the latest documentation about features and region-free pricing. Also, our YouTube video from Google I/O in June shares some history of Google’s network infrastructure which gave rise to load balancing on Cloud Platform.

Thank you for your continued support. Happy load balancing!

-Posted by Gary Ling, Product Manager