Gateway Load Balancer

Deploy, scale, and run third-party virtual appliances

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.

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

Benefits

Deploy third-party virtual appliances faster

Gateway Load Balancer takes care of scale, availability, and service delivery so that the AWS Partner Network and AWS Marketplace can deliver virtual appliances more quickly. With Gateway Load Balancer, you can also work with select partners that offer fully managed security solutions—making it easier to set up infrastructure security services within minutes.

Scale virtual appliances while managing costs

Hitting the limit of what your virtual appliances can handle can bottleneck your entire network. To prevent this, Gateway Load Balancer automatically scales your virtual appliances up or down, based on demand.

With many virtual appliances available with bring-your-own-license (BYOL) or pay-as-you-go pricing, you have the option to only pay for what you use, and reduce the chances of over provisioning.

Improve virtual appliance availability

To ensure your virtual appliances are available and healthy, Gateway Load Balancer runs health checks on a configurable cadence.

When it detects an unhealthy virtual appliance, Gateway Load Balancer reroutes traffic away from that instance to a healthy one, so you experience graceful failover during both planned and unplanned down time. 

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.
 

Use cases

Centralize your third-party virtual appliances

Consolidating your third-party virtual appliances with Gateway Load Balancer can reduce operational overhead and costs.

By working across multiple VPCs and user accounts, Gateway Load Balancer gives you the option of centralizing your appliance fleet. With fewer places to manage appliances, Gateway Load Balancer helps ensure consistent security and deployment policies are enforced, and the chance of operator error is reduced.

Increase visibility with third-party analytics solutions

Because third-party virtual appliances deployed within Gateway Load Balancer sit in line with network traffic (known as a “bump-in-the-wire”), they are uniquely positioned for network logging and monitoring roles. These types of third-party analytics and monitoring appliances can help you diagnose problems, build more resilient applications, and run more effectively.

Add third-party security appliances to your network

As part of your defense-in-depth strategy, you can use third-party virtual appliances such as next generation firewalls (NGFW), web application firewalls (WAF), and intrusion detection and prevention systems. With Gateway Load Balancer and AWS Marketplace, you can find solutions that make it easier to quickly add these capabilities to your network.

Integration with orchestration and deployment tools

Network orchestration tools make it easier to provision and manage your network. Gateway Load Balancer can be deployed using orchestration tools from industry leaders—naturally fitting in to your operational processes and systems.

In addition, Gateway Load Balancer works with AWS CloudFormation—a powerful tool for automating the deployment and management of AWS resources. Because Gateway Load Balancer replaces multiple layers of VPCs and load-balancers with one central service, your CloudFormation templates are easier to write and maintain.  

Features

Scale your virtual appliance instances automatically

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.

Bring higher availability to your third-party virtual appliances

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.

Monitor continuous health and performance metrics

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).

Simplify deployment with AWS Marketplace

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. 

Ensure private connectivity over the AWS network using Gateway Load Balancer Endpoints

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. 

Elastic Load Balancing Features
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