AWS offers multiple balancers to address the needs of a client AWS environment and produce the necessary resources to accomplish their IT solution with minimal latency.   This include:  Elastic, Application, Network, and Gateway load balancers.  In this article we will address the user and application of Gateway Load Balancing in an AWS environment.

A load balancer’s main purpose is spread the workload of a given task among many different resources, thus avoiding queue waits for process.   In the IT realm, this is normally a server which forwards request to other servers in an attempt to spread the work evenly among them.

Characteristics of Gateway Load Balancer:

         1. Used to Deploy, Scale, and Manage fleet of 3rd party network virtual appliances.

         2. Examples of use: Firewalls, Intrusion Detection/Prevention, and Deep packet inspection.

         3. Operates at Layer 3 (Network Layer) IP Packets.

         4. Operation is transparent to Application being accessed.

         5. Functions

             1. Transparent Network Gateway – Single entry/exit for all traffic.

             2. Load Balancer – Spreads work across virtual appliances.

         6. Uses GENEVE protocol on port 6081

         7. Target groups for GLB can be EC2 Instance or IP Addresses (Private IPs only)

Flow of Gateway Load Balancer Traffic

End User —->

Gateway Load Balancer —->

Target Groups for Analysis of Traffic (Here either dropped or forwards back to Gateway Load Balancer)  —->

Gateway Load Balancer – Application (destination)