We never got to talk about creating the actual Load Balancer?

Hello!  It might seem a little unexpected in how I do this, but I actually address these questions at 2:40 in this lecture:

I especially suggest that you look at the whooole Cloud Load Balancer structure that GKE sets up for you.  Follow the links from one thing to the next so you understand how all of those pieces tie together.

For many of our labs, so far, we’ve been building the pieces up from scratch–but this is a perfect opportunity to see how all of the pieces you need for some functionality (in this case it’s the global load balancer) can often get created for you, automatically, by higher-level services like GKE.  But you still have visibility into what you’ve (indirectly) created and you can test it out.

To answer your last question, you can also hook up unmanaged instance groups to the load balancer, if you want to–and that is done in exactly the same way as managed instance groups are connected–but that is something you would only do as a sad concession and not best practice.  ([Y]ou should always create managed instance groups unless your applications require you to group instances together that are not identical.)  For this reason, I think you are very unlikely to see this on your ACE exam or in any real-world situation.  But if you’re curious, here’s some more documentation on it.

I hope this helps!

Mattias