What is a Gateway Load Balancer?
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes your incoming traffic across multiple targets, in one or more Availability Zones. It monitors the health of its registered targets, and routes traffic only to the healthy targets. Elastic Load Balancing scales your load balancer as your incoming traffic changes over time. It can automatically scale to the vast majority of workloads.
Elastic Load Balancing supports the following load balancers: Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, Gateway Load Balancers, and Classic Load Balancers. You can select the type of load balancer that best suits your needs. This guide discusses Gateway Load Balancers. For more information about the other load balancers, see the User Guide for Application Load Balancers, the User Guide for Network Load Balancers, and the User Guide for Classic Load Balancers.
Gateway Load Balancer overview
Gateway Load Balancers enable you to deploy, scale, and manage virtual appliances, such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and deep packet inspection systems. It combines a transparent network gateway (that is, a single entry and exit point for all traffic) and distributes traffic while scaling your virtual appliances with the demand.
A Gateway Load Balancer operates at the third layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, the
network layer. It listens for all IP packets across all ports and forwards traffic to the target
group that's specified in the listener rule. It maintains flow
stickiness to a specific target appliance using 5-tuple (default), 3-tuple, or 2-tuple.
The Gateway Load Balancer and its registered virtual appliance instances exchange application traffic using the
GENEVE
Gateway Load Balancers use Gateway Load Balancer endpoints to securely exchange traffic across VPC boundaries. A Gateway Load Balancer endpoint is a VPC endpoint that provides private connectivity between virtual appliances in the service provider VPC and application servers in the service consumer VPC. You deploy the Gateway Load Balancer in the same VPC as the virtual appliances. You register the virtual appliances with a target group for the Gateway Load Balancer.
Traffic to and from a Gateway Load Balancer endpoint is configured using route tables. Traffic flows from the service consumer VPC over the Gateway Load Balancer endpoint to the Gateway Load Balancer in the service provider VPC, and then returns to the service consumer VPC. You must create the Gateway Load Balancer endpoint and the application servers in different subnets. This enables you to configure the Gateway Load Balancer endpoint as the next hop in the route table for the application subnet.
For more information, see Access virtual appliances through AWS PrivateLink in the AWS PrivateLink Guide.
Appliance vendors
You are responsible for choosing and qualifying software from appliance vendors. You must
trust the appliance software to inspect or modify traffic from the load balancer. The appliance
vendors listed as Elastic Load Balancing
Partners
Getting started
To create a Gateway Load Balancer using the AWS Management Console, see Getting started. To create a Gateway Load Balancer using the AWS Command Line Interface, see Getting started using the CLI.
Pricing
With your load balancer, you pay only for what you use. For more information, see Elastic Load Balancing pricing