> Any load balancer is always a single point of failure.

Yes, but Google takes this to another level, all their load balancers are one single giant point of failure.

> This is why lots of folks go multi-cloud.

Or, just use AWS, where each region is almost entirely independent (some specific APIs are global by their nature, like creating a new S3 bucket), but you shouldn't be using those APIs on your run-path.

Yes, it is less convenient (and it must be less convenient for AWS to build things this way than for Google who seem to prioritise their development experience over customer availability), but new features from AWS are making it easier to deploy to multiple regions and use cross-region failover.

CDNs are single vendors but usually have a resilient and distributed system without a SPOF within, meaning traffic can always route through even with major network outages. This has been a core part of their design for a long time and I can't remember the last time an entire CDN has been down.

GLB is also distributed but clearly is a single "service" within GCP with weaknesses that can take down the entire thing, probably because of the complexity and integration involved in its architecture. It's fast and convenient but the reliability just isn't there yet.

I have yet to read solid case studies of real multi-cloud at scale. E.g. Active-Active load-balanced between multiple providers. Plenty of companies use multiple clouds, but, it tends to be a line of business decision. Team A likes AWS, Team B like Azure etc.

Agreed, multi-cloud is rather costly and means only using infrastructure services like VMs and storage.

It's fairly common. No need to call it multi cloud, companies have had multiple datacenters in multiple countries for a long time.

The only challenge is that you need global geographic load balancers and that means F5 and at least a million dollar.

Also, you will find out later that some dependencies were only running in a single location and services failed with the datacenter.

I think that’s quite an exaggeration - there are quite a few DNS providers who can do intelligent DNS LB for you and don’t care what your backend is (gcp/AWS/azure/onprem). Won’t even cost you a million bucks.

I'm not sure I agree with that, it's trivial to deploy 2 or more independent ALBs in parallel in AWS if it's a concern for you, with health checks on each from Route53 dns?

And multi-DNS provider. :)

Everyone always forgets about DNS, until Dyn dies.

Fricken Dyn... I pay them too... I'd move my DNS services to Google, but I'd have put them behind a load balancer... heh

DNS as a load balancer doesn't have any SPOFs if you do it right (but if you need to coordinate advanced load balancing between multiple providers, that's a bit painful)

I wonder if floating IPs can offer a solution here, combined with multi-cloud LBs?