One domain name “load balanced” over multiple regions in Google Compute Engine

Question

I have service running on Google Compute Engine. I've got few instances in Europe in a target pool and few instances in US in a target pool. At the moment I have a domain name, which is hooked up to the Europe target pool IP, and can load balance between those two instances very nicely.

Now, can I configure the Compute Engine Load Balancer so that the one domain name is connected to both regions? All load balancing rules seem to be related to a single region, and I don't know how I could get all the instances involved.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can point one domain name (A record) at multiple IP addresses, i.e. mydomain.com -> 196.240.7.22 204.80.5.130, but this setup will send half the users to the U.S., and the other half to Europe.

What you probably want to look for is a service that provides geo-aware or geo-located DNS. A few examples include loaddns.com, Dyn, or geoipdns.com, and it also looks like there are patches to do the same thing with BIND.

Answer 2

You should configure your DNS server. Google does not have a DNS service, as one part of their offering, at the moment. You can use Amazon's Route 53 to route your requests. It has a nice feature called latency based routing which allows you to route clients to different IP addresses (in your case - target pools) based on latency. You can find more information here - http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/03/21/amazon-route-53-adds-latency-based-routing/

Answer 3

With Google's HTTP load balancing, you can load balance traffic over these VMs in different regions by exposing via one IP. Google eliminates the need for GEO DNS. Have a look at the doc:

https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/

Hope it helps.