A company is planning to deploy a gaming telemetry ingest service on Google Cloud Compute Engine. The service receives raw, non-HTTP TCP traffic on port 7000 directly from external game client applications around the world. The architecture team requires a load balancing solution that preserves the original client IP addresses in backend server logs without terminating the TCP connections at an intermediary proxy. Which Google Cloud load balancer should the team select?
- External Passthrough Network Load BalancerAnswer
- BExternal Application Load Balancer
- CInternal Passthrough Network Load Balancer
- DExternal Proxy Network Load Balancer without PROXY protocol
Answer
External Passthrough Network Load Balancer is the correct architectural choice because it handles external raw TCP traffic at Layer 4 and preserves the original client source IP address directly.
An External Passthrough Network Load Balancer is a regional Layer 4 load balancer that routes raw TCP/UDP traffic directly to Compute Engine backend instances. Because it does not terminate connections at a proxy, the original client packet headers (including the source IP address) remain intact when delivered to the backend VMs.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Selecting GCP Load Balancers based on traffic scope (internal/external), OSI layer (L4 vs L7), and packet passthrough vs proxy behavior.