Load Balancing Decision Lab
Deploy a global external HTTP load balancer on Google Cloud and compare load-balancer families to build exam-ready decision confidence.
Lab Overview
This lab walks you through deploying a real HTTP load-balanced service on Google Cloud. You will create backend VMs with nginx, wire up instance groups, health checks, backend services, URL maps, target proxies, and forwarding rules, then test the resulting load balancer.
The final task focuses on the comparison skills the Associate Cloud Engineer exam requires: regional versus global, external versus internal, and HTTP(S) versus TCP/SSL proxy load balancers.
You'll learn to:
- Create compute instances with startup scripts and unmanaged instance groups
- Configure HTTP health checks and backend services with named ports
- Build a global external HTTP load balancer end to end
- Distinguish among Google Cloud load-balancer families for exam scenarios
Key Resources:
What You'll Learn
Deploy backend VMs and configure an unmanaged instance group
Create health checks and a global backend service
Wire together a URL map, target HTTP proxy, and forwarding rule
Compare regional/global, external/internal, and HTTP/TCP load balancer families
Clean up all load balancer resources safely
Prerequisites
Basic Google Cloud console and gcloud CLI familiarity
Understanding of VPC, subnets, and firewall rules
Familiarity with Compute Engine instances
Technologies Covered
Part of a Course
This lab is part of the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer course
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