Load Balancer Architecture Unification

The Challenge

Our infrastructure had evolved to a state where multiple disparate load balancers were being used to expose various services. This fragmented architecture created several problems:

• Increased Complexity: Onboarding new services was a complicated and error-prone process.
• Inconsistent Security: Security policies had to be managed in multiple places, leading to potential gaps.
• Poor Observability: It was difficult to get a unified view of traffic across all services.
• Higher Costs: Managing multiple load balancers was less cost-efficient than a single, shared solution.

The Architectural Solution

I proposed and led a project to refactor our ingress architecture by unifying all load balancers into a single, centralized solution on GCP. This involved a careful migration of traffic and reconfiguration of our networking to route all incoming requests through the new, unified ingress point.

The Outcomes

This architectural improvement yielded significant benefits across the board:

• Reduced Complexity: Onboarding new services became a simple, standardized process.
• Improved Security: All traffic now flows through a single point where security policies can be consistently applied and managed.
• Enhanced Observability: The centralized solution provided a single pane of glass for monitoring all ingress traffic.
• Significant Cost Savings: Consolidating the load balancers resulted in a direct and notable reduction in our monthly cloud networking costs.