Google Wednesday rolled out load balancing features to its public cloud service, allowing customers to automatically scale up and down virtual machines to accommodate unexpected spikes in demand. Google rolled out load balancing features to its public cloud service today, allowing customers to automatically scale up and down virtual machines to accommodate unexpected spikes in demand.The rollout comes just a few months after Microsoft improved its Azure cloud service with new auto-scaling features. Both companies are effectively playing catch-up with leading IaaS provider Amazon Web Services, which already offers such features.[ Stay on top of the cloud with InfoWorld’s “Cloud Computing Deep Dive” special report. Download it today! | From Amazon to Windows Azure, see how the elite 8 public clouds compare in InfoWorld Test Center’s review. | For the latest news and happenings, subscribe to the Cloud Computing Report newsletter. ] [WHEN DISASTER STRIKES:World Savings Robots]Load balancing is a “critical” feature for any highly scalable cloud deployment, Google engineers wrote in announcing the company’s service today. It allows Google Compute Engine to automatically and intelligently route traffic across a collection of servers. This replaces a manual process where new virtual machines would be provisioned by the user. It’s intelligent because the system can automatically check to ensure the VMs are healthy and can accept traffic. The load balancing can be configured either using a command line interface or through APIs.Earlier this summer Microsoft released new auto-scaling features to its Azure cloud platform. That allowed similar functionality, with the ability to scale compute resources up or down compute resources in its cloud. Both auto-scaling and load balancing are typically used to handle traffic spikes or large-scale increases or decreases in resources. The difference between the two is that auto-scaling spreads CPU workloads across a predefined cluster of servers, whereas load balancing allows network bandwidth traffic to be distributed across clusters of servers on the fly, according to a forum post on AWS’s website.Network World senior writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW. Cloud ComputingAmazon.comTechnology Industry