Load balancers, Cloud DNS, and Cloud CDN
Nine load balancer combinations exist across scope, exposure, and layer — picking the wrong tier can mean a routing requirement simply can't be implemented at all.
Speaker notes
- The load balancer choice spans global/regional, external/internal, and Layer 4/Layer 7 — a Layer 4 Network Load Balancer has no visibility into HTTP semantics at all, so routing by URL path or header value requires an Application Load Balancer; choosing the wrong tier isn't a missed feature, it's a requirement that can't be met.
- Cloud DNS supports public zones for external-facing records and private zones resolvable only from within a specific VPC — useful for internal service discovery that shouldn't be publicly resolvable at all.
- Cloud CDN caches content at Google's edge, close to end users — a direct latency win for static content and a real cost reduction since cached responses never reach the origin. Network service tiers add one more dimension: Premium routes edge-to-edge on Google's own private backbone for lower latency at higher cost; Standard uses the public internet for part of the path and fits only genuinely latency-insensitive internal workloads.
Deck map
01
GCP foundations in one line
02
How the ACE exam maps to this course
03
GCP's geography and the project as the unit of isolation
04
Organization, folders, and projects
05
Org policies and how inheritance works
06
Labels, network tags, and resource manager tags
07
Billing accounts, budgets, and cost control
08
gcloud CLI, Cloud Shell, and client libraries
09
Terraform on GCP and the end of Deployment Manager
10
Gemini CLI, Cloud Assist, and Application Design Center
11
Principals, roles, bindings, and policies
12
Primitive, predefined, custom roles, and IAM conditions
13
Service accounts, keys, and impersonation
14
Workload Identity Federation
15
Break-glass access and IAM auditing
16
Choosing a machine family: E2, N4, C4
17
Disks, OS Login, and VM Manager
18
Spot VMs and managed instance groups
19
Autoscaling policies, health checks, GPUs and TPUs
20
GKE Autopilot vs Standard vs the 2026 hybrid option
21
Node pools and pod autoscaling
22
Cloud Run revisions, traffic splitting, and functions
23
Choosing between GKE, Cloud Run, and Compute Engine
24
Cloud Storage classes and lifecycle management
25
Choosing a managed database
26
The managed database lineup
27
Connection pooling, read replicas, and Pub/Sub
28
Backup, regional failover, and CMEK
29
VPC networks, subnets, and Shared VPC
30
Firewall rules, tags, and Cloud NAT
31
Load balancers, Cloud DNS, and Cloud CDN
32
VPN, Interconnect, and private access
33
How a request actually reaches shipment-api
34
Cloud Monitoring: metrics, dashboards, alerts
35
Cloud Logging: router, buckets, and audit logs
36
Trace, Profiler, Error Reporting, and Managed Prometheus
37
How the five Cloud Operations products fit together
38
Readiness checklist