Gateway Load Balancer

Deploy, scale, and run third-party virtual appliances

Why Gateway Load Balancer?

Gateway Load Balancer helps you easily deploy, scale, and manage your third-party virtual appliances. It gives you one gateway for distributing traffic across multiple virtual appliances while scaling them up or down, based on demand. This decreases potential points of failure in your network and increases availability.

You can find, test, and buy virtual appliances from third-party vendors directly in AWS Marketplace. This integrated experience streamlines the deployment process so you see value from your virtual appliances more quickly—whether you want to keep working with your current vendors or try something new.

AWS re:Invent 2020: Introducing Gateway Load Balancer for deploying & running virtual appliances

Benefits

Gateway Load Balancer works with industry-leading technology partners

With Gateway Load Balancer, you get the performance of a cloud-native load balancing service for virtual appliances and the simplicity to choose virtual appliances offered by innovative AWS Partners in AWS Marketplace. As you move to the cloud, you can also get support with deploying third-party security services from some of our industry-leading partners.

Find your partner here

Use cases

Page Topics

Features

Features

Gateway Load Balancer works with AWS Auto Scaling groups and lets you to set target utilization levels for your virtual appliance instances. This ensures you have the optimal amount of resources available at all times. When traffic increases, additional instances are created and connected to the Gateway Load Balancer. When traffic returns to normal levels, those instances are terminated.

Gateway Load Balancer ensures high availability and reliability by routing traffic flows through healthy virtual appliances, and rerouting flows when a virtual appliance becomes unhealthy. To ensure that your virtual appliances are available and healthy, Gateway Load Balancer runs health checks on each virtual appliance instance on a configurable cadence. If the number of consecutive failed tests exceed a set threshold, the appliance will be declared unhealthy and traffic will no longer be routed to that instance.

You can monitor your Gateway Load Balancer using Amazon CloudWatch per Availability Zone metrics. These include the total number of ENIs/interfaces, IP addresses of ENIs/interfaces, number of packets in/out, number of bytes in/out, packet errors, and packet drops, load balancer metrics (such as the number of target appliance instances, target health status, healthy/unhealthy target count, current number of active flows, max flows, and processed bytes), and VPC Endpoint metrics (such as the number of Gateway Load Balancer Endpoint mappings).

Deploying a new virtual appliance can be as simple as selecting it in AWS Marketplace. This further simplifies deployment while creating a great user experience. 

Used by Gateway Load Balancer to connect to sources and destinations of network traffic, Gateway Load Balancer Endpoints are a new type of VPC endpoint. Powered by PrivateLink technology, it connects Internet Gateways, VPCs, and other network resources over a private connection. Your traffic flows over the AWS network, and data is never exposed to the internet.