Google Cloud Platform for Developers

Global forwarding rules

Much like network load balancers, global load balancers use forwarding rules to map traffic to a specific IP address to the load balancer. In order to route traffic to different regions, global load balancers use global forwarding rules, which bind to a global IP address and a single target proxy. Note however that one target proxy may be referenced by multiple global forwarding rules, allowing for a target proxy to receive traffic from both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

Together with target proxies, global forwarding rules and global IP addresses implement anycast, where a single IP address is intelligently routed to multiple backends. Anycast technology is at the heart of global load balancers and how much of their magic ...