I created a cluster in GCP Kubernetics Engine and exposed the same through a load balancer as specified in the documentation.

Used the following code:

kubectl expose deployment deployment-name --type=LoadBalancer --port 80 --target-port 8080

This worked well and provided me with an external IP. My cluster is located in asia-south1 region and placed it inside a VPC(and subnet) within the same region.

The issue is when I checked my packet hops using traceroute <load balancer ip> I found that my packets are reaching California. Seeing that I checked the location of my load balancer by IP, I found that my load balancer Ip is in California too. Why is this happening here? I expected my load balancer to sit in asia-south1 and my packets to only travel in this region? Is there anything wrong with my configuration?

My actual issue here is latency. My server code(Nodejs) finishes the execution in ~70ms, but to deliver the response to me (sitting in asia) it took ~650ms (for ~100 concurrent users). This is unacceptable.

Adding the traceroute logs here:

 1  xiaoqiang (192.168.31.1)  1.689 ms  1.208 ms  1.324 ms
 2  10.143.0.1 (10.143.0.1)  2.873 ms  8.561 ms  6.314 ms
 3  10.229.0.13 (10.229.0.13)  6.356 ms  3.581 ms  3.517 ms
 4  broadband.actcorp.in (183.82.14.221)  2.793 ms  5.884 ms  26.071 ms
 5  14.141.24.249.static-hyderabad.tcl.net.in (14.141.24.249)  6.486 ms
    14.141.24.161.static-hyderabad.tcl.net.in (14.141.24.161)  2.450 ms
    14.141.24.145.static-hyderabad.tcl.net.in (14.141.24.145)  2.870 ms
 6  * * *
 7  * * *
 8  115.113.165.98.static-mumbai.vsnl.net.in (115.113.165.98)  35.840 ms  39.332 ms  35.704 ms
 9  * * 108.170.248.161 (108.170.248.161)  39.351 ms
10  209.85.253.246 (209.85.253.246)  48.228 ms *
    209.85.251.18 (209.85.251.18)  76.367 ms
11  * * *
12  * * *
13  * * *
14  * * *
15  * * *
16  * <MY LOAD BALANCER IP>  32.129 ms *