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Set Up Application Load Balancers experiment Lab schedule 1 hour universal_currency_alt 1 Credit show_chart Introductory info This lab may incorporate AI tools to support your learning. GSP155 Google Cloud self-paced labs logo Overview In this hands-on lab you learn how to set up a Layer 7 (L7) application load balancer on Compute Engine virtual machines (VMs). L7 load balancers can understand HTTP(S) protocols, allowing them to make routing decisions based on parameters like URL, headers, cookies, and the content of the request. This allows for improved application performance and responsiveness. There are several ways you can load balance on Google Cloud. This lab takes you through the setup of the following load balancers: Application Load Balancer You are encouraged to type the commands yourself, which can help you learn the core concepts. Many labs include a code block that contains the required commands. You can easily copy and paste the commands from the code block into the appropriate places during the lab. Objectives In this lab, you learn how to perform the following tasks: Configure the default region and zone for your resources. Create an Application Load Balancer. Test the traffic to your insances. Setup and requirements Before you click the Start Lab button Read these instructions. Labs are timed and you cannot pause them. The timer, which starts when you click Start Lab, shows how long Google Cloud resources are made available to you. This hands-on lab lets you do the lab activities in a real cloud environment, not in a simulation or demo environment. It does so by giving you new, temporary credentials you use to sign in and access Google Cloud for the duration of the lab. To complete this lab, you need: Access to a standard internet browser (Chrome browser recommended). Note: Use an Incognito (recommended) or private browser window to run this lab. This prevents conflicts between your personal account and the student account, which may cause extra charges incurred to your personal account. Time to complete the lab—remember, once you start, you cannot pause a lab. Note: Use only the student account for this lab. If you use a different Google Cloud account, you may incur charges to that account. How to start your lab and sign in to the Google Cloud console Click the Start Lab button. If you need to pay for the lab, a dialog opens for you to select your payment method. On the left is the Lab Details pane with the following: The Open Google Cloud console button Time remaining The temporary credentials that you must use for this lab Other information, if needed, to step through this lab Click Open Google Cloud console (or right-click and select Open Link in Incognito Window if you are running the Chrome browser). The lab spins up resources, and then opens another tab that shows the Sign in page. Tip: Arrange the tabs in separate windows, side-by-side. Note: If you see the Choose an account dialog, click Use Another Account. If necessary, copy the Username below and paste it into the Sign in dialog. student-04-64c4ce935f38@qwiklabs.net Copied! You can also find the Username in the Lab Details pane. Click Next. Copy the Password below and paste it into the Welcome dialog. tuMdNgmFTIVH Copied! You can also find the Password in the Lab Details pane. Click Next. Important: You must use the credentials the lab provides you. Do not use your Google Cloud account credentials. Note: Using your own Google Cloud account for this lab may incur extra charges. Click through the subsequent pages: Accept the terms and conditions. Do not add recovery options or two-factor authentication (because this is a temporary account). Do not sign up for free trials. After a few moments, the Google Cloud console opens in this tab. Note: To access Google Cloud products and services, click the Navigation menu or type the service or product name in the Search field. Navigation menu icon and Search field Activate Cloud Shell Cloud Shell is a virtual machine that is loaded with development tools. It offers a persistent 5GB home directory and runs on the Google Cloud. Cloud Shell provides command-line access to your Google Cloud resources. Click Activate Cloud Shell Activate Cloud Shell icon at the top of the Google Cloud console. Click through the following windows: Continue through the Cloud Shell information window. Authorize Cloud Shell to use your credentials to make Google Cloud API calls. When you are connected, you are already authenticated, and the project is set to your Project_ID, qwiklabs-gcp-00-3c690d79bc26. The output contains a line that declares the Project_ID for this session: Your Cloud Platform project in this session is set to qwiklabs-gcp-00-3c690d79bc26 gcloud is the command-line tool for Google Cloud. It comes pre-installed on Cloud Shell and supports tab-completion. (Optional) You can list the active account name with this command: gcloud auth list Copied! Click Authorize. Output: ACTIVE: * ACCOUNT: student-04-64c4ce935f38@qwiklabs.net To set the active account, run: $ gcloud config set account ACCOUNT (Optional) You can list the project ID with this command: gcloud config list project Copied! Output: [core] project = qwiklabs-gcp-00-3c690d79bc26 Note: For full documentation of gcloud, in Google Cloud, refer to the gcloud CLI overview guide. Task 1. Set the default region and zone for all resources Set the default region: gcloud config set compute/region us-west1 Copied! In Cloud Shell, set the default zone: gcloud config set compute/zone us-west1-a Copied! Learn more about choosing zones and regions in Compute Engine's Regions and zones documentation. Task 2. Create multiple web server instances For this load balancing scenario, you create three Compute Engine VM instances and install Apache on them, then add a firewall rule that allows HTTP traffic to reach the instances. The code provided sets the zone to us-west1-a. Setting the tags field lets you reference these instances all at once, such as with a firewall rule. These commands also install Apache on each instance and gives each instance a unique home page. Create a virtual machine, www1, in your default zone using the following code: gcloud compute instances create www1 \ --zus-west1-a \ --tags=network-lb-tag \ --machine-type=e2-small \ --image-family=debian-11 \ --image-project=debian-cloud \ --metadata=startup-script='#!/bin/bash apt-get update apt-get install apache2 -y service apache2 restart echo " <h3>Web Server: www1</h3>" | tee /var/www/html/index.html' Copied! Create a virtual machine, www2, in your default zone using the following code: gcloud compute instances create www2 \ --zus-west1-a \ --tags=network-lb-tag \ --machine-type=e2-small \ --image-family=debian-11 \ --image-project=debian-cloud \ --metadata=startup-script='#!/bin/bash apt-get update apt-get install apache2 -y service apache2 restart echo " <h3>Web Server: www2</h3>" | tee /var/www/html/index.html' Copied! Create a virtual machine, www3, in your default zone. gcloud compute instances create www3 \ --zus-west1-a \ --tags=network-lb-tag \ --machine-type=e2-small \ --image-family=debian-11 \ --image-project=debian-cloud \ --metadata=startup-script='#!/bin/bash apt-get update apt-get install apache2 -y service apache2 restart echo " <h3>Web Server: www3</h3>" | tee /var/www/html/index.html' Copied! Create a firewall rule to allow external traffic to the VM instances: gcloud compute firewall-rules create www-firewall-network-lb \ --target-tags network-lb-tag --allow tcp:80 Copied! Now you need to get the external IP addresses of your instances and verify that they are running. Run the following to list your instances. You'll see their IP addresses in the EXTERNAL_IP column: gcloud compute instances list Copied! Verify that each instance is running with curl, replacing [IP_ADDRESS] with the external IP address for each of your VMs: curl http://[IP_ADDRESS] Copied! Click Check my progress to verify that you've created a group of web servers. Assessment Completed! Create multiple web server instances Assessment Completed! Task 3. Create an Application Load Balancer Application Load Balancing is implemented on Google Front End (GFE). GFEs are distributed globally and operate together using Google's global network and control plane. You can configure URL rules to route some URLs to one set of instances and route other URLs to other instances. Requests are always routed to the instance group that is closest to the user, if that group has enough capacity and is appropriate for the request. If the closest group does not have enough capacity, the request is sent to the closest group that does have capacity. To set up a load balancer with a Compute Engine backend, your VMs need to be in an instance group. The managed instance group provides VMs running the backend servers of an external application load balancer. For this lab, backends serve their own hostnames. First, create the load balancer template: gcloud compute instance-templates create lb-backend-template \ --region=us-west1 \ --network=default \ --subnet=default \ --tags=allow-health-check \ --machine-type=e2-medium \ --image-family=debian-11 \ --image-project=debian-cloud \ --metadata=startup-script='#!/bin/bash apt-get update apt-get install apache2 -y a2ensite default-ssl a2enmod ssl vm_hostname="$(curl -H "Metadata-Flavor:Google" \ http://169.254.169.254/computeMetadata/v1/instance/name)" echo "Page served from: $vm_hostname" | \ tee /var/www/html/index.html systemctl restart apache2' Copied! Managed instance groups (MIGs) let you operate apps on multiple identical VMs. You can make your workloads scalable and highly available by taking advantage of automated MIG services, including: autoscaling, autohealing, regional (multiple zone) deployment, and automatic updating. Create a managed instance group based on the template: gcloud compute instance-groups managed create lb-backend-group \ --temp