How a Two-Tier GCP Architecture Keeps Apps Running During Traffic Surges
A developer designed a secure two-tier cloud architecture on Google Cloud Platform to address the vulnerabilities and performance limits of single-VM deployments. The setup separates public-facing traffic from backend application servers, with a Global HTTP Load Balancer distributing requests across two Compute Engine instances hosted in a private subnet with no public IP addresses. Firewall rules follow the principle of least privilege, restricting SSH access via Google's Identity-Aware Proxy and limiting backend traffic to load balancer health check ranges only. Cloud NAT enables outbound internet access for private instances without exposing them directly to users. The architecture is illustrated using a fictional grocery platform, FreshCart, whose single-server setup collapsed under a promotional traffic spike — a problem this multi-tier design is built to prevent.
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