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Elastic Load Balancing

Gateway Load Balancer

Deploy, scale, and run third-party virtual appliances

Gateway Load Balancer

Gateway Load Balancer makes it easy to 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 eliminates potential points of failure in your network and increases availability.
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Benefits

Amazon Web Services Partner Network and Amazon Web Services Marketplace partners are ready for Gateway Load Balancer today. As you move to the cloud, you can choose to continue using the appliances and tools you are familiar with, or look for something new. This can be done as simply as choosing a third-party virtual appliance in the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

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.

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.

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

You use intrusion detection and prevention devices, next-generation firewalls (NGFW), web application firewalls (WAF), and DDoS protection systems, as part of your defense in depth strategy. When adding these capabilities to your network using third-party virtual appliances, Gateway Load Balancer helps you deploy them faster.

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 Amazon CloudFormation—a powerful tool for automating the deployment and management of Amazon Web Services 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

Gateway Load Balancer works with Amazon 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 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 Amazon Web Services 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 Amazon Web Services network, and data is never exposed to the internet.