GCP: HTTPS termination. Why is the load balancer so expensive?

Question

I want to use a GCP load balancer to terminate HTTPS and auto manage HTTPS cert renewal with Lets Encrypt.

The pricing calculator gives me $21.90/month for a single rule. Is this how much it would cost to do HTTPS termination for a single domain? Are there cheaper managed options on GCP?

Answer 1

Before looking at the price, and to another solution, look at what you need. Are you aware of Global Load balancer capabilities?

It offers you a unique IP reachable all over the globe and route the request to the region the closest to your user for reducing the latency. If the region is off, or the capacity of your backend full (health check KO), the request is routed to the next closest region.

It allows you to rewrite your URL, to manage SSL certificates, to cache your file into CDN, to scale with your traffic, to deploy security layer on top of it, like IAP, to absorb the DDoS attack without impacting your backend.

And the price is for 5 forwarding rules, not only one.

Now, of course, you can do differently.

You can use regional solution. This solution is often free or affordable. But you don't have all the Global load balancer feature.

• If your backend is on Cloud Run or App Engine. Cloud Endpoint is a solution for Cloud Function (and other API endpoints).
• You can deploy and set up your own nginx with your SSL certificate on a compute engine.
• If you want to serve only static file, you can have a look to Firebase hosting.