AWS Gateway Load Balancer

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.

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.

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

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.

As part of your defense-in-depth strategy, you can use third-party virtual appliances such as 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.

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.

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.