# Global Load Balancer

> Google's global external load balancer bills forwarding rules hourly, where the first 5 rules share one charge and each additional rule bills separately, plus a per-GB fee on processed data. ZopNight inventories global load balancers via Cloud Asset Inventory, attributes their charges from billing actuals, and flags rules serving no traffic.

Source: https://zop.dev/integrations/gcp/gcp-global-lb
Updated: 2026-08-19

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A global external load balancer distributes traffic across regions with a single anycast IP, billed for forwarding rules and processed data. Forwarding rules bill hourly even with zero traffic.

## The five-rule bundle and per-GB processing

Global load balancer billing has a shape worth memorizing: the first five forwarding rules share one hourly charge, and each additional rule bills separately on its own hourly meter. Data processing then adds a per-GB component that scales with actual traffic. The consequence is that rule count, not balancer count, drives the fixed cost. An organization with 12 forwarding rules pays the bundle plus 7 individual rule meters, whether those rules front a product or nothing at all. Zero-traffic rules keep their full hourly charge; the meter measures existence, not usefulness.

## Anycast front doors that outlive their backends

Because a global balancer is the public face of a service, teams are rightly nervous about deleting one, and that nervousness is how dead ones persist. The recurring patterns: a product retired region by region until every backend emptied while the forwarding rules stayed; HTTPS and HTTP rule pairs where the HTTP redirect rule survived a consolidation that removed its HTTPS partner; and per-environment rules (dev, staging, demo) that pushed the account past the five-rule bundle without anyone noticing the sixth rule started its own meter.

## Spend attribution for global load balancers

ZopDev inventories global load balancers via Cloud Asset Inventory, attributes their charges from billing actuals, and flags rules serving no traffic. Attribution matters more here than on most types because the bundle pricing makes per-rule cost non-obvious: the billing export, not arithmetic on a rate card, is what says what each front door really costs. Nothing is schedulable; a balancer has no off state, so flagged rules resolve through deletion after the usual DNS and dependency checks.

## Global LB inventory in the console

Google Cloud console → Network services → Load balancing, filtered to global scope, lists each balancer with its frontends and backend health. Cross-reference any rule flagged as traffic-silent against its frontend IP before removal. The anycast address released with the last rule is not recoverable.