External passthrough Network Load Balancer and Service Directory overview

You can choose to automatically register your external passthrough Network Load Balancer service with Service Directory when you create an external passthrough Network Load Balancer. This enables client applications to use Service Directory through HTTP, gRPC, or DNS to resolve the address of the external passthrough Network Load Balancer service and connect to it directly.

Register an external passthrough Network Load Balancer with Service Directory

To register an external passthrough Network Load Balancer, run the gcloud compute forwarding-rules create command and set the service-directory-registration flag:

gcloud beta compute forwarding-rules create FORWARDING_RULE_NAME \
    --region=REGION \
    --load-balancing-scheme=EXTERNAL \
    --address=RESERVED_IP_ADDRESS \
    --ip-protocol=PROTOCOL_TYPE \
    --ports=PORT_NUMBER \
    --backend-service=BACKEND_SERVICE_NAME \
    --backend-service-region=REGION \
    --service-directory-registration=SD_SERVICE_NAME

Replace the following:

  • FORWARDING_RULE_NAME: a name for the forwarding rule that you want to create
  • REGION: the region to create the forwarding rule in
  • RESERVED_IP_ADDRESS: the IP address that the forwarding rule serves
  • PROTOCOL_TYPE: the IP protocol that the rule is to serve
  • PORT_NUMBER: a list of comma-separated ports
  • BACKEND_SERVICE_NAME: the target backend service that receives the traffic
  • SD_SERVICE_NAME: the fully qualified name of the Service Directory service where you want to register the endpoint. This service must be in the same project and region as the forwarding rule being created. For example: projects/PROJECT/locations/REGION/namespaces/NAMESPACE_NAME/services/SERVICE_NAME.

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