Question

Difficulty: Very hardDeploying Cloud Load Balancers and Configuring Cloud DNS

An enterprise application hosted on Compute Engine backend instance groups in both `us-central1` and `europe-west1` requires HTTP/HTTPS traffic routing, SSL termination, and path-based URL mapping for global internet traffic. Additionally, corporate users on an on-premises network connected via Cloud Interconnect must resolve the application domain `app.example.com` to internal VPC endpoints, whereas external internet users must resolve `app.example.com` to the public-facing entry point. Which combination of load balancing and Cloud DNS configurations correctly implements this split-horizon architecture?

  1. Deploy a Global External Application Load Balancer configured with a global static IP address, frontend SSL certificate, and URL map. Configure a Cloud DNS public zone for app.example.com containing an A record pointing to the global public IP address. Create a Cloud DNS private zone for app.example.com authorized for the VPC network containing A records pointing to internal backend endpoints, and enable a Cloud DNS inbound server policy on the VPC network for on-premises resolution.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy an External Passthrough Network Load Balancer in each region configured with regional external IP addresses. Configure a Cloud DNS public zone with a weighted round-robin policy to perform path-based URL routing across the regional IP addresses, and configure Cloud DNS outbound peering zones to push private DNS records to on-premises DNS servers.
  3. C
    Deploy a Global External Application Load Balancer for internet traffic. Enable the Cloud DNS API directly within the on-premises Active Directory project configuration, and establish a Cloud DNS peering zone configured to sync private records directly into the on-premises DNS server.
  4. D
    Deploy a Global External Application Load Balancer. Create a Cloud DNS private zone for app.example.com at the GCP Organization resource hierarchy level, relying on organization-level inheritance to automatically intercept and override external public DNS queries for all internet clients.

Answer

Deploy a Global External Application Load Balancer with a public static IP address, a Cloud DNS public zone pointing to the public IP for internet clients, a Cloud DNS private zone bound to the VPC for internal endpoints, and a Cloud DNS inbound server policy to allow on-premises systems to resolve the private DNS zone over Cloud Interconnect.
The correct solution uses a Global External Application Load Balancer to satisfy the Layer 7 HTTP/HTTPS features (path-based routing, SSL termination, multi-region backends). To achieve split-horizon DNS, internet clients use a Cloud DNS public zone resolving to the load balancer's external IP address, while on-premises users query the Cloud DNS private zone via a Cloud DNS Inbound Server Policy over Cloud Interconnect to receive internal IP addresses.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the traffic and protocol requirements for external web clients.
Select a Global External Application Load Balancer to provide Layer 7 HTTP/HTTPS traffic management, SSL offloading, and URL path-based routing across multiple regions (`us-central1` and `europe-west1`).
Layer 4 network load balancers cannot perform HTTP URL path matching or global SSL proxy termination for external web workloads.
2
Configure public DNS resolution for external internet clients.
Create an A record in a Cloud DNS public zone pointing `app.example.com` to the Global External Application Load Balancer's public IP address.
Public internet clients must resolve the domain to the public IP address of the Global External Load Balancer.
3
Configure private DNS resolution and split-horizon access for corporate on-premises clients.
Create a Cloud DNS private zone for `app.example.com` attached to the VPC network with internal IP A records, and create an Inbound DNS Server Policy on the VPC network.
The Cloud DNS private zone overrides public DNS inside the VPC, while the inbound DNS policy creates entry-point IP addresses in the VPC that on-premises DNS forwarders can query over Cloud Interconnect.

Key Concept

Deploying Global External Application Load Balancers alongside Cloud DNS split-horizon private zones and inbound server policies for hybrid cloud environments.
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