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hands-on lab

Balance the Traffic to Compute Engine Instances Through a Load Balancer

Difficulty: Beginner
Duration: Up to 45 minutes
Students: 1,994
Rating: 4.7/5
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Description

Because of high availability and scalability, when you deploy an application in the cloud, one of the most chosen solutions is using a pool of instances. By using an instance pool, you have several servers that run the application you deployed sync with the latest version of it. One of the tasks to perform when choosing this kind of solution is to let the traffic reach the instances in the pool. You don't want to let public access to every single instance, but you should create a single endpoint from where instances can be reached. This is the main usage of a load balancer. It is a resource that allows you to create a single entry point for your resources, apply filters, and then dispatch the traffic to the resources depending on the load of each one. In this lab, you will create an instance group and attach to it two Compute Engine instances that you will find in your GCP environment. Then, you will create a load balancer that will be associated with the instance group. This way, you will able to create a single entry point for your virtual machines and balance the traffic directed to them.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab, you will be able to:

  • Create an instance group associated with several Compute Engine VMs
  • Define a load balancer attached to the instance group
  • Create a single entry point for a pool of resources instead of having one for each resource

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

  • Google Cloud Professional Cloud Developer (PCD) certification candidates
  • Individuals who want to learn a solution for handling and managing traffic to a pool of resources
  • Solutions architects who want to better understand the concepts of load balancing

Prerequisites

This lab has no prerequisites.

Updates

May 14th, 2025 - Updated lab environment. Updated lab screenshots to reflect the latest UI

May 29th, 2024 - Updated lab to use Debian 12

April 16th, 2024 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

October 9th, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

February 3rd, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

August 3rd, 2022 - Resolved deployment issue

Environment before

Environment after

Covered topics

Google Cloud Platform
Compute for Google
Compute Engine
Virtualization for Google
Virtualization
Compute
Hands-on Lab UUID

Lab steps

0 of 5 steps completed.Use arrow keys to navigate between steps. Press Enter to go to a step if available.
  1. Signing In to the Google Cloud Console
  2. Defining an Instance Group for the Compute Engine Instances
  3. Allowing Traffic to the Compute Engine Instances
  4. Creating a Load Balancer for the Instance Group
  5. Testing the Functionality of the Load Balancer

Lab Rules