Container-native load balancing on GKE now generally available

Improvements in container-native load balancing

Thanks to your feedback during the beta period, we’ve made several improvements to container-native load balancing with NEGs. In addition to having several advantages over the previous approach (based on IPTables), container-native load balancing now also includes:

Latency improvements: The latency of scaling down your load-balanced application to zero pod backends and then subsequently scaling back up is now faster by over 90%. This significantly improves response times for low-traffic services, which can now quickly scale back up from zero pods when there’s traffic.

Improved Kubernetes integration: Using the Kubernetes pod readiness gate feature, a load-balancer backend pod is considered ‘Ready’ once the Load balancer health check for the pod is successful and the pod is healthy. This ensures that rolling updates will proceed only after the pods are ready and fully configured to serve traffic. Now, you can manage the load balancer and backend pods with native Kubernetes APIs without injecting any unnecessary latency.

Standalone NEGs (beta): You can now manage your own load balancer (without having to create an HTTP/S based Ingress on GKE) using standalone NEGs, allowing you to configure and manage several flavors of Google Cloud Load Balancing. These include TCP proxy or SSL proxy based load balancing for external traffic, HTTP(S) based load balancing for internal traffic (beta) and global load balancing using Traffic Director for internal traffic. You can also create a load balancer with hybrid backends (GKE pods and Compute Engine VMs) or a load balancer with backends spread across multiple GKE clusters.

Getting started with container-native load balancing

You can use container-native load balancing in several scenarios. For example, you can create an Ingress using NEGs with VPC-native GKE clusters created using Alias IPs. This provides native support for pod IP routing and enables advertising prefixes. Check out how to create an Ingress using container native load balancing. Then, drop us a line about how you use NEGs, and other networking features you’d like to see on GCP.