How To Use Gcp Load Balancer In WordPress

The key to success is a reliable and quick website. One of the best ways to keep a WordPress site that gets a lot of traffic or is expected to grow rapidly, fast and reliable is by implementing a load balancer. There is a load balancing solution on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to handle web traffic.

In this post, we will cover how and why to use a GCP load balancer with WordPress, the set-up process, challenges, and things to be aware of.

When it comes to WordPress sites, why do we need load balancing?

With a very popular WordPress site, performance problems can occur from high traffic, long load times, server failure, and a possibly bad user experience. These problems are basically resolved by load balancing, which loads incoming traffic across several servers and no single server can be overloaded. The GCP load balancer is best suited for traffic management, global distribution and flexibility.

What is load balancing?

Traffic director is a load balancer that takes incoming web requests and sends them to multiple remote servers (or instances).

The load-balancing procedure on GCP is delineated below:

• Traffic Distribution: Traffic is evenly distributed to server based on server capacity, location or round robin by load balancer.
• Health Checks: Each server’s health is checked by the load balancer. If a server is unavailable, load balancer will redirect the traffic to the active servers.
• Auto-Scaling: GCP’s auto scaling feature pairs with GCP’s load balancer so that when usage increases, instances are added and when usage decreases, instances are removed.
• SSL termination: The GCP load balancer will do SSL termination for secure connections to users, encrypting traffic between the load balancer and users for better security.

Why should you use the GCP Load Balancer with WordPress?

The load balancer from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides the following.

• Performance: It ensures 100% optimal performance even in the case of high traffic, by spreading tasks across servers.
• High Availability: Traffic is redirected to the active server, therefore minimizing downtime.
• Scalability: It works with auto scaling and handles traffic surges efficiently.
• Global: If we route the traffic to the nearest server, we can get faster load times using GCP’s global network.

Advantages of Load Balancing

Load balancing is a way to efficiently manage traffic between application servers and consumers, and has many benefits.

These advantages consist of:

1. Enhanced availability

The main task of load balancing is to gracefully guide traffic between undermaintained or down servers to the up and running ones in order to maintain the availability constant. Specifically, this method provides means of outage avoidance allowing for application access when the server is performing upgrades and maintenance.

2. Enhanced Scalability

The load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers, minimizing the chance that any single server becomes overburdened, in order to optimize system performance under fluctuating traffic loads. In this way, it provides dynamic compensation for dynamic load, enabling the scale to effortlessly adjust to traffic fluctuation and the resource is allocated in a smart way.

3. Enhanced Performance

The way to make applications tight and responsive is to distribute duties in a uniform manner between a group of servers using load balancing mechanisms. In addition, the system provides fast and efficient data transmission by routing user requests to the nearest server, thereby minimizing latency.

4. Effective Failure Management

When server fails, they reserve server resources and automatically redirect traffic to operational servers. Any traffic generated at the datacenter should be directed to one of the servers containing the data; by using this, the load balancer would send traffic to the unaffected servers when a network outage occurs that disrupts a critical resource like a mail server, reducing interruptions and maintaining service continuity.

Methods to implement GCP Load Balancer in WordPress

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has some potential focuses so that it can be beneficial in optimizing and scaling WordPress applications. In the course of this topic, we shall look at the procedures of using GCP load balancing at a WordPress site. Load balancing also plays an essential function in web hosting where we identify how traffic from the network is shared among different computers to enhance web-site efficiency and reliability.

However, of course, before we talk in more detail about the implementation methods, it is crucial to define what a GCP load balancing solution actually involves.

1. Global Load Balancer: A Global Load balancer loads the traffic to multiple backends including the Https load balancers, regional managed instances, and NEGs.
2. HTTP(S) Load Balancer: An HTTP(S) load balancer is on the receiving end of incoming HTTPS traffic and it directs traffic to backend services such as WordPress instances.
3. Backend Services: Backend services have control over routing of traffic received from load balancer to instances hosting the WordPress application.
4. Target Proxies: Target proxies serve the function of transmitting traffic coming from the load balancer to the actual backend services.
5. Backend Buckets: Backend buckets provide static data like images, CSS files or Java script files etc.

Now, let’s discuss the methods for implementing GCP load balancing on a WordPress website:

Method 1: Google Cloud Load Balancer with WordPress on GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine)

GKE is a managed container orchestration service provided by Google cloud, which enables users to deploy, manage and automate the containerized applications running on their organizations Google cloud cluster. That combined with the GKE and GCP load balancing allows for endless scaling to accommodate WordPress applications.

Here are the steps to implement GCP load balancing on a WordPress website using GKE:

1. Deploy WordPress on GKE: The first step that should be taken involves creating a Kubernetes cluster on Google’s Kubernetes Engine, often abbreviated GKE. You can either do it through the Google Cloud Console or through the gcloud CLI. After this, install WordPress on the GKE cluster either through Helm chart or using Kubernetes manifests.
2. Set up Ingress: After launching a WordPress pod on GKE, you have to configure an Ingress controller. An Ingress is an API object of Kubernetes which is used to expose a service outside the cluster. Ingress resources are backed by many load balancers one of which is the GCP HTTP(S) load balancers. You can use either the NGINX Ingress Controller or any of the Ingress controllers compatible with the chosen load balancing from GCP.
3. Configure GCP HTTP(S) Load Balancer: In the Google Cloud Console, or using gcloud command-line tool, set an HTTP(S) load balancer. The infrastructure to direct the traffic to the GKE cluster’s created Ingress resource is set up.
4. Set up SSL/TLS Certificates: In this step, you have to manage SSL/TLS certificates that will be used to protect traffic between your users and your WordPress application. Some of these certificates are Let’s Encrypt and you can acquire them freely but there are paid certificates also from a certificate authority (CA).
5. Test the Load Balancer Configuration: When you’re done configuring the GCP load balancer, check the operation of your WordPress site and how the traffic is being submitted. Some of the ways that may be used to check load balancing include; By checking the HTTP headers using curl or any browser developer tools.

Method 2: Implementing of GCP Load Balancer with WordPress on Compute engine

In this method, the GCP Load Balancer will be with WordPress instances deployed on the Compute Engine.

Here are the steps:

1. Set up WordPress on Compute Engine: Starting up of several WordPress hosts on Google Compute Engine. Remember to create a managed instance group that these instances are part of.
2. Create a Target Proxy: In the Google Cloud Console create a new target proxy and set the PHP variable to point to the target pool with the WordPress instances.
3. Set up Health Checks: Check health-check settings on your WordPress instances. This is a way of making sure that load balancer only sends traffic to healthy instances only. This will open the managed instance group details where you set the new health check settings.
4. Configure SSL/TLS Certificates: As noted before, you can get a certificate from a CA or use Let’s Encrypt and Certbot to get free certificates.
5. Test the Load Balancer Configuration: Once you’ve got the load balancer set up, you should test to make sure the traffic always gets sent to your WordPress site.

Continuing on that note, it’s possible to apply load balancing from GCP to the WordPress site with containers with the use of the Google Kubernetes Engine or the Compute Engine. Therefore, you can utilize load balancing from GCP to make the WordPress application to be constantly available, fast, and scalable. GCP has resources all over the world and managed services to deal with higher traffic and give the customers a pleasant experience.

Items to Bear in Mind

• Centralized Database: All the WordPress instances are synced to a single database say (Cloud SQL).
• SSL: Installs and configures an SSL on the load balancer for HTTPS.
• Health Checks: Customize health checks to follow the requirements of your WordPress server.
• Caching: Use GCP CDN and cache WordPress.
• Data Synchronization: Back it up, to keep it safe, and prevent it from going away. Frequently synchronize content (files, images) between instances to prevent inconsistency.

Issues and Resolution

• Latency: Latency comes from incorrect configurations or when the database response time prolongs. You have to watch performance and adjust configurations as needed.
• Session Management: When there are multiple instances, WordPress sessions can cause problems. If you wish to use object or session caching or session admin throughout instances, then you need to use a plugin.
• Instances that fail health checks: If they fail, check your firewall settings, and health check parameters.