Question 1

What's the difference between Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud CDN?

Accepted Answer

Cloud Load Balancing routes requests to the best backend service (like VM instances, Kubernetes services, or serverless backends) based on health, capacity, and location. Cloud CDN caches content at edge locations so repeat requests can be served faster without always reaching your backends. Many architectures use both: the load balancer as the front door, and CDN caching in front of or integrated with it for static and cacheable content.

Question 2

When should I use Cloud Load Balancing?

Accepted Answer

Use it when you need to distribute traffic across multiple backends for reliability, scale, or performance. Common triggers include: you have users in multiple regions and want them routed to the closest healthy backend; you need automatic failover if a zone or region goes down; you want to scale horizontally behind a single IP/hostname; or you need advanced traffic controls like SSL termination, health checks, and traffic splitting.

Question 3

How much does Cloud Load Balancing cost?

Accepted Answer

Pricing depends on the load balancer type (HTTP(S), TCP/SSL, internal), the amount of data processed, and the number of forwarding rules or proxies used. You may also pay for related features such as Cloud CDN, SSL certificates (if applicable), and outbound data transfer from backends. For accurate estimates, use the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator and model expected requests/throughput and regions.

Cloud Load Balancing

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