Sign in into the **Google Cloud Platform**

Type "**Load balancing**" in the search bar and click on the **Load balancing** option

**What is Load Balancing?**\
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Load balancing in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a service that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers or instances. It ensures high availability and reliability by distributing the workload to prevent any single server from becoming overwhelmed. GCP offers several types of load balancing, including HTTP(S), TCP/SSL, and UDP, to handle different types of traffic. This helps improve application performance and provides seamless scaling to meet varying levels of demand.

**Load balancing** wizard will open, click on the **CREATE LOAD BALANCER** button on the left side

**Create a Load balancer** wizard will open, select the **Application Load balancer (HTTP/HTTPS)** radio button and click on the **NEXT** button

**What is the Application Load balancer?**\
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An Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributes incoming web traffic (HTTP/HTTPS) across multiple servers to ensure high availability and performance. It can route traffic based on content, offload SSL encryption, and monitor server health to only send traffic to healthy servers. In GCP, the HTTP(S) Load Balancer serves as the ALB.

On the **Public facing or internal** section, select the **Internal** radio button and click on the **NEXT** button

**What is an Internal Load balancer?**\
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An **Internal Load Balancer** routes client requests to backend services within a private network using internal IP addresses, ensuring traffic remains within the VPC.

On the **Cross-region or single region deployment** section, select the **Best for regional workloads** radio button and click on the **NEXT** button

**What is Best for regional workloads option in Cross-region or single region deployment?**\
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For **regional workloads**, GCP recommends a **single-region deployment** to maintain resources within one geographic area. This setup minimizes latency by keeping traffic local, improves performance for users within the region, and helps reduce costs by avoiding inter-region data transfer fees. Single-region deployment is ideal for applications with users concentrated in a specific location, where high availability across multiple regions isn’t a priority.

Scroll the page and click on the **CONFIGURE** button

**Create classic Application Load Balancer** wizard will open, scroll to the **Backend configuration** dropdown section and click on the **CREATE A BACKEND SERVICE** button

**Create backend service** wizard will open, scroll to the Name text input field and enter "**my-ig-backend-service**"

Scroll to the **Backend type** dropdown section and select the option **Instance group**

Scroll to the **Protocol** dropdown section and select the option **HTTP**

Scroll to the **Instance group** dropdown section and select the option **my-managed-instance-group (us-central1, multi-zone)**

Scroll to the **Port numbers** text input field and enter "**80**"

Scroll to the **Balancing mode** section and select the option **Utilization**

Scroll to the **Health check** dropdown section

Click on the button **CREATE A HEALTH CHECK**

Google Cloud

This guide provides a step-by-step approach to creating a regional load balancer on Google Cloud, ensuring that users can easily manage and distribute workloads effectively.

Creating a regional load balancer - NEW