Peter Fast

Supporting technical study

Google Cloud VPC & Load Balancing Lab

Built a temporary Google Cloud VPC, tested how firewall rules change VM reachability, and distributed HTTP requests across three web servers.

Completed

Completed October 2026

Google Cloud · Compute Engine · VPC firewall · Cloud Shell · gcloud CLI · Network load balancing

The problem

A cloud network needs deliberate rules for which machines can communicate, while a public web endpoint needs a way to spread traffic across multiple servers.

My contribution

  • Configured virtual machines, VPC firewall rules, and a network load balancer in a temporary Google Cloud lab.
  • Ran connectivity and HTTP checks, then preserved terminal captures and removed the lab resources.

Evidence you can inspect

The screenshots preserve two observations from the temporary lab: changed reachability after firewall-rule removal and HTTP responses identifying each of three backends.

Terminal shows successful pings followed by packet loss after firewall rules were removed.
Firewall experiment: removing rules changed which addresses could be reached. Open full evidence image

Three web servers behind one endpoint

Cloud Shell output identifies HTTP responses from www1, www2, and www3.
Repeated requests through the public endpoint returned three distinct backend labels. Open full evidence image

Recorded observations

  • Initial internal and external pings: 3 of 3 responses each
  • After removing the ICMP rule: external ping lost 3 of 3 packets; internal ping still received 3 of 3
  • After removing the internal custom rule: internal ping lost 3 of 3 packets
  • Repeated HTTP requests returned responses labeled www1, www2, and www3
  • Temporary lab resources were deleted after testing; this is coursework, not a live production service

How I approached the work

  1. Created a VPC and VMs in us-central1 and us-east1, then verified 3 of 3 ping responses to the second VM's internal and external addresses.
  2. Deleted the ICMP allow rule; the external ping lost all three packets while the internal ping still worked.
  3. Deleted the internal custom allow rule; the internal ping then lost all three packets.
  4. Created three Apache VMs, a health check, target pool, reserved IP, and forwarding rule; repeated curl requests returned www1, www2, and www3.
  5. Removed the temporary load balancer, servers, firewall rules, VMs, and VPC after testing.

Demonstrated outcomes

  • Ping behavior changed when ingress rules were removed.
  • Repeated HTTP requests returned responses from www1, www2, and www3.

Limitations and unfinished work

  • This is academic lab evidence, not production infrastructure or a cloud certification.
  • The temporary resources were deleted. The captures do not establish load capacity, uptime, or performance under traffic.

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