Cloud Load Balancing enhancements improve security and distributed application support

At Google Cloud Next ‘23 , the Cloud Networking Load Balancing team announced multiple enhancements that unlock new use cases and increase your value when using Google Cloud Load Balancing. The four of the marquee features we introduced are: mTLS support adds client-side authentication during TLS negotiation on global external Application Load Balancers. This capability allows the server to verify the client’s identity in the same way that the client verifies the server’s identity during standard TLS authentication. Thus, mTLS provides an additional security layer that helps protect against man-in-the-middle attacks and other threats.

Service Extensions callouts allow users to customize the data-plane processing of select load balancers with user-created or third-party applications.