Google Cloud load balancer session affinity demystified by our in-house experts.

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our Google Cloud Platform Support.

Let’s take a look at how our GCP Support Team is ready to help customers with Google Cloud load balancer session affinity.

All about Google Cloud, Load Balancer & Session Affinity

Load balancing plays a critical role in preventing servers from getting overloaded or breaking down. Furthermore, there are several different load balancer options across different cloud platforms. However, we are focusing on Google Cloud load balancers today.

In fact, understanding these services go a long way in helping us create and implement applications on the Google Cloud Platform.

Moreover. network load balancers are responsible for balancing the load of our systems according to the incoming IP protocol data like address, port as well as protocol type. In fact, they rely on forwarding rules pointing to target pools.

Furthermore, some applications require multiple requests from a single user to the same endpoint or backend. Ultimately, this results in uneven load distribution.

Session affinity works by delivering requests to the same request backend that serves the initial request. In fact, session affinity is disabled by default. In this scenario, load balancers tend to distribute the new requests according to the 5-tuple hash as seen below:

• Packet’s Source IP address
• Source port
• Packet’s Destination IP address
• Destination Port
• Packet’s Protocol

Additionally, our GCP Support Techs recommend using RATE balancing mode over UTILIZATION mode. Furthermore, session affinity works at its optimal best by setting the balancing mode to RPS or requests per second.

Now, let’s take a look at the different types of session affinity by HTTP(S) load balancer:

• Client IP affinity
• Client IP affinity
• Header field affinity
• Generated cookie affinity
• HTTP Cookie affinity

Things to remember: Google Cloud Load Balancer Session Affinity

• Do not use session affinity for security or authentication purposes.
• Google Cloud load balancers offer session affinity at a best-effort basis.
• Load balancers with session affinity enabled tend to balance load better when there is a large distribution of unique sessions.
• If the intended endpoint or instance is more than the balancing mode’s target maximum, session affinity may be broken for external as well as internal HTTP (S) load balancers.
• Traffic Director does not support session affinity after configuring proxyless gRPC services.
• The default values of –subsetting-policy and –session-affinity flags are both NONE. We can set only one of them to a different value at a time.

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Conclusion

In brief, our skilled GCP Support Engineers at Bobcares took us through Google Cloud load balancer session affinity.