Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Cloud load balancing > Documentation > Guides | SSL Proxy Load Balancing overview | My 30+ minutes reading time

 Sept. 15, 2021

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SSL Proxy Load Balancing overview

 

SSL Proxy Load Balancing is a reverse proxy load balancer that distributes SSL traffic coming from the internet to virtual machine (VM) instances in your Google Cloud VPC network.

When using SSL Proxy Load Balancing for your SSL traffic, user SSL (TLS) connections are terminated at the load balancing layer, and then proxied to the closest available backend instances by using either SSL (recommended) or TCP. For the types of backends that are supported, see Backends.

With the Premium Tier, SSL Proxy Load Balancing can be configured as a global load balancing service. With Standard Tier, the SSL proxy load balancer handles load balancing regionally. For details, see Load balancer behavior in Network Service Tiers.

In this example, traffic from users in Iowa and Boston is terminated at the load balancing layer, and a separate connection is established to the selected backend.

Cloud Load Balancing with SSL termination (click to enlarge)
Cloud Load Balancing with SSL termination (click to enlarge)

SSL Proxy Load Balancing is intended for non-HTTP(S) traffic. For HTTP(S) traffic, we recommend that you use HTTP(S) Load Balancing.

For information about how the Google Cloud load balancers differ from each other, see the following documents:

Following are some benefits of using SSL Proxy Load Balancing:

  • IPv6 termination. SSL Proxy Load Balancing supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for client traffic. Client IPv6 requests are terminated at the load balancing layer, and then proxied over IPv4 to your VMs.

  • Intelligent routing. The load balancer can route requests to backend locations where there is capacity. In contrast, an L3/L4 load balancer must route to regional backends without considering capacity. The use of smarter routing allows provisioning at N+1 or N+2 instead of x*N.

  • Better utilization of backends. SSL processing can be very CPU-intensive if the ciphers used are not CPU efficient. To maximize CPU performance, use ECDSA SSL certificates and TLS 1.2, and prefer the ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 cipher suite for SSL between the load balancer and your backend instances.

  • Certificate management. Your customer-facing SSL certificates can be either certificates that you obtain and manage (self-managed certificates), or certificates that Google obtains and manages for you (Google-managed certificates). Google-managed SSL certificates each support up to 100 domains. Multiple domains are supported for Google-managed certificates. You only need to provision certificates on the load balancer. On your VMs, you can simplify management by using self-signed certificates.

  • Security patching. If vulnerabilities arise in the SSL or TCP stack, we apply patches at the load balancer automatically to keep your VMs safe.

  • Support for the following well-known ports: 25, 43, 110, 143, 195, 443, 465, 587, 700, 993, 995, 1883, 3389, 5222, 5432, 5671, 5672, 5900, 5901, 6379, 8085, 8099, 9092, 9200, and 9300. When you use Google-managed SSL certificates with SSL Proxy Load Balancing, the frontend port for traffic must be 443 to enable the Google-managed SSL certificates to be provisioned and renewed.

  • SSL policies. SSL policies give you the ability to control the features of SSL that your SSL proxy load balancer negotiates with clients.

  • Geographic control over where TLS is terminated. The SSL proxy load balancer terminates TLS in locations that are distributed globally, so as to minimize latency between clients and the load balancer. If you require geographic control over where TLS is terminated, you should use Network Load Balancing instead, and terminate TLS on backends that are located in regions appropriate to your needs.

The following are components of SSL proxy load balancers.

Forwarding rules route traffic by IP address, port, and protocol to a load balancing configuration consisting of a target proxy and a backend service.

Each forwarding rule provides a single IP address that you can use in DNS records for your application. No DNS-based load balancing is required. You can either reserve a static IP address that you can use or let Cloud Load Balancing assign one for you. We recommend that you reserve a static IP address; otherwise, you must update your DNS record with the newly- assigned ephemeral IP address whenever you delete a forwarding rule and create a new one.

Each external forwarding rule that you use in an SSL proxy load balancer can reference exactly one of the ports listed in: Port specifications for forwarding rules.

SSL Proxy Load Balancing terminates SSL connections from the client and creates new connections to the backends. The target proxy routes incoming requests directly to the backend service.

By default, the original client IP address and port information is not preserved. You can preserve this information by using the PROXY protocol.

You must install one or more SSL certificates on the target SSL proxy. These certificates are used by target SSL proxies to secure communications between a Google Front End (GFE) and the client. These can be self-managed or Google-managed SSL certificates. For information about SSL certificate limits and quotas, see SSL certificates on the load balancing quotas page.

You can create SSL policies to control the features of SSL that your load balancer negotiates. For details, see SSL policies overview.

Sending traffic over unencrypted TCP between the load balancing layer and backend instances enables you to offload SSL processing from your backends; however, it also reduces security. Therefore, we do not recommend it. For the best security, use end-to-end encryption for your SSL proxy load balancer deployment. For more information, see Encryption from the load balancer to the backends.

For general information about how Google encrypts user traffic, see the Encryption in Transit in Google Cloud white paper.

Backend services direct incoming traffic to one or more attached backends. Each backend is composed of an instance group or network endpoint group, and information about the backend's serving capacity. Backend serving capacity can be based on CPU or requests per second (RPS).

Each backend service specifies the health checks to perform for the available backends.

To ensure minimal interruptions to your users, you can enable connection draining on backend services. Such interruptions might happen when a backend is terminated, removed manually, or removed by an autoscaler. To learn more about using connection draining to minimize service interruptions, see Enabling connection draining.

The backend instances must allow connections from the following sources:

  • The load balancer Google Front End (GFE) for all requests sent to your backends
  • Health check probes

To allow this traffic, you must create ingress firewall rules. The ports for these firewall rules must allow traffic as follows:

  • To the destination port for each backend service's health check.

  • For instance group backends: Determined by the mapping between the backend service's named port and the port numbers associated with that named port on each instance group. The numbers can vary among instance groups assigned to the same backend service.

  • For GCE_VM_IP_PORT NEG backends: To the port numbers of the endpoints.

Firewall rules are implemented at the VM instance level, not on GFE proxies. You cannot use Google Cloud firewall rules to prevent traffic from reaching the load balancer. You can use Google Cloud Armor to achieve this.

For more information about health check probes and why it's necessary to allow traffic from them, see Probe IP ranges and firewall rules.

For SSL proxy load balancers and TCP proxy load balancers, the required source ranges are as follows:

  • 130.211.0.0/22
  • 35.191.0.0/16

These ranges apply to health checks and requests from the GFE.

The source IP address for packets, as seen by the backends, is not the Google Cloud external IP address of the load balancer. In other words, there are two TCP connections:

  • Connection 1, from original client to the load balancer (GFE):

    • Source IP address: the original client (or external IP address if the client is behind NAT or a forward proxy).
    • Destination IP address: your load balancer's IP address.

  • Connection 2, from the load balancer (GFE) to the backend VM or endpoint:

    • Source IP address: an IP address in one of the ranges specified in Firewall rules.

    • Destination IP address: the internal IP address of the backend VM or container in the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network.

To preserve the original source IP addresses of incoming connections to the load balancer, you can configure the load balancer to prepend a PROXY protocol version 1 header to retain the original connection information. For more information, see Update proxy protocol header for the proxy.

The SSL proxy load balancers are reverse proxy load balancers. The load balancer terminates incoming connections, and then opens new connections from the load balancer to the backends. These load balancers are implemented using Google Front End (GFE) proxies worldwide.

GFEs have several open ports to support other Google services that run on the same architecture. To see a list of some of the ports likely to be open on GFEs, see Forwarding rule: Port specifications. There might be other open ports for other Google services running on GFEs.

Running a port scan on the IP address of a GFE-based load balancer is not useful from an auditing perspective for the following reasons:

  • A port scan (for example, with nmap) generally expects no response packet or a TCP RST packet when performing TCP SYN probing. GFEs will send SYN-ACK packets in response to SYN probes for a variety of ports if your load balancer uses a Premium Tier IP address. However, GFEs only send packets to your backends in response to packets sent to your load balancer's IP address and the destination port configured on its forwarding rule. Packets sent to different load balancer IP addresses or your load balancer's IP address on a port not configured in your forwarding rule do not result in packets being sent to your load balancer's backends. Even without any special configuration, Google infrastructure and GFEs provide defense-in-depth for DDoS attacks and SYN floods.

  • Packets sent to the IP address of your load balancer could be answered by any GFE in Google's fleet; however, scanning a load balancer IP address and destination port combination only interrogates a single GFE per TCP connection. The IP address of your load balancer is not assigned to a single device or system. Thus, scanning the IP address of a GFE-based load balancer does not scan all the GFEs in Google's fleet.

With that in mind, the following are some more effective ways to audit the security of your backend instances:

  • A security auditor should inspect the forwarding rules configuration for the load balancer's configuration. The forwarding rules define the destination port for which your load balancer accepts packets and forwards them to the backends. For GFE-based load balancers, each external forwarding rule can only reference a single destination TCP port.

  • A security auditor should inspect the firewall rule configuration applicable to backend VMs. The firewall rules that you set block traffic from the GFEs to the backend VMs, but do not block incoming traffic to the GFEs. For best practices, see the firewall rules section.

The way an SSL proxy load balancer distributes traffic to its backends depends on the balancing mode and the hashing method selected to choose a backend (session affinity).

TCP Proxy Load Balancing can be configured as a global load balancing service with Premium Tier, and as a regional service in the Standard Tier.

For Premium Tier:

  • You can have only one backend service, and the backend service can have backends in multiple regions. For global load balancing, you deploy your backends in multiple regions, and the load balancer automatically directs traffic to the region closest to the user. If a region is at capacity, the load balancer automatically directs new connections to another region with available capacity. Existing user connections remain in the current region.
  • Google advertises your load balancer's IP address from all points of presence, worldwide. Each load balancer IP address is global anycast.
  • If you configure a backend service with backends in multiple regions, Google Front Ends (GFEs) attempt to direct requests to healthy backend instance groups or NEGs in the region closest to the user. Details for the process are documented on this page.

For Standard Tier:

  • Google advertises your load balancer's IP address from points of presence associated with the forwarding rule's region. The load balancer uses a regional external IP address.

  • You can configure backends in the same region as the forwarding rule. The process documented here still applies, but GFEs only direct requests to healthy backends in that one region.

Request distribution process:

The balancing mode and choice of target define backend fullness from the perspective of each zonal GCE_VM_IP_PORT NEG, zonal instance group, or zone of a regional instance group. Distribution within a zone is then done with consistent hashing.

The load balancer uses the following process:

  1. The forwarding rule's external IP address is advertised by edge routers at the borders of Google's network. Each advertisement lists a next hop to a Layer 3/4 load balancing system (Maglev) as close to the user as possible.
  2. Maglev systems inspect the source IP address of the incoming packet. They direct the incoming request to the Maglev systems that Google's geo-IP systems determine are as close to the user as possible.
  3. The Maglev systems route traffic to a first-layer Google Front End (GFE). The first-layer GFE terminates TLS if required and then routes traffic to second-layer GFEs according to this process:
    1. If a backend service uses instance group or GCE_VM_IP_PORT NEG backends, the first layer-GFEs prefer second-layer GFEs that are located in or near the region that contains the instance group or NEG.
    2. For backend buckets and backend services with hybrid NEGs, serverless NEGs, and internet NEGs, the first-layer GFEs choose second-layer GFEs in a subset of regions such that the round trip time between the two GFEs is minimized.

      Second-layer GFE preference is not a guarantee, and it can dynamically change based on Google's network conditions and maintenance.

      Second-layer GFEs are aware of health check status and actual backend capacity usage.

  4. The second-layer GFE directs requests to backends in zones within its region.
  5. For Premium Tier, sometimes second-layer GFEs send requests to backends in zones of different regions. This behavior is called spillover.

    6. Spillover is governed by two principles:

    • Spillover is possible when all backends known to a second-layer GFE are at capacity or are unhealthy.
    • The second-layer GFE has information for healthy, available backends in zones of a different region.

    The second-layer GFEs are typically configured to serve a subset of backend locations.

    Spillover behavior does not exhaust all possible Google Cloud zones. If you need to direct traffic away from backends in a particular zone or in an entire region, you must set the capacity scaler to zero. Configuring backends to fail health checks does not guarantee that the second-layer GFE spills over to backends in zones of a different region.

  6. When distributing requests to backends, GFEs operate at a zonal level.

    With a low number of connections, second-layer GFEs sometimes prefer one zone in a region over the other zones. This preference is normal and expected. The distribution among zones in the region doesn't become even until the load balancer receives more connections.

When you add a backend to the backend service, you set a load balancing mode.

For SSL Proxy Load Balancing, the balancing mode can be CONNECTION or UTILIZATION.

If the load balancing mode is CONNECTION, the load is spread based on how many concurrent connections the backend can handle. You must also specify exactly one of the following parameters: maxConnections (except for regional managed instance groups), maxConnectionsPerInstance, or maxConnectionsPerEndpoint.

If the load balancing mode is UTILIZATION, the load is spread based on the utilization of instances in an instance group.

For information about comparing the load balancer types and the supported balancing modes, see Load balancing methods.

Session affinity sends all requests from the same client to the same backend, if the backend is healthy and has capacity.

SSL Proxy Load Balancing offers client IP affinity, which forwards all requests from the same client IP address to the same backend.

If a backend becomes unhealthy, traffic is automatically redirected to healthy backends within the same region. If all backends within a region are unhealthy, traffic is distributed to healthy backends in other regions (Premium Tier only). If all backends are unhealthy, the load balancer drops traffic.

If you are building applications in Google Kubernetes Engine, you can use standalone NEGs to load balance traffic directly to containers. With standalone NEGs you are responsible for creating the Service object that creates the NEG, and then associating the NEG with the backend service so that the load balancer can connect to the Pods.

Related GKE documentation:

  • SSL proxy load balancers each have a single backend service resource. Changes to the backend service are not instantaneous. It can take several minutes for changes to propagate to Google Front Ends (GFEs).

  • SSL proxy load balancers do not support client certificate-based authentication, also known as mutual TLS authentication.

  • Although SSL Proxy Load Balancing can handle HTTPS traffic, we don't recommend this. You should instead use HTTP(S) Load Balancing for HTTPS traffic. HTTP(S) Load Balancing also does the following, which makes it a better choice in most cases:

    • Negotiates HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.
    • Rejects invalid HTTP requests or responses.
    • Forwards requests to different VMs based on URL host and path.
    • Integrates with Cloud CDN.
    • Spreads the request load more evenly among backend instances, providing better backend utilization. HTTPS load balances each request separately, whereas SSL Proxy Load Balancing sends all bytes from the same SSL or TCP connection to the same backend instance.

  • For SSL proxy load balancers with Google-managed SSL certificates, the frontend ports must include 443 for the certificates to be provisioned and renewed successfully.

    SSL Proxy Load Balancing can be used for other protocols that use SSL, such as WebSockets and IMAP over SSL.

  • SSL proxy load balancers support only lowercase characters in domains in a common name (CN) attribute or a subject alternative name (SAN) attribute of the certificate. Certificates with uppercase characters in domains are returned only when set as the primary certificate in the target proxy.

  • SSL proxy load balancers do not support VPC Network Peering.
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