11 Nov, 2020
AWS launches Gateway Load Balancer for highly available and scalable network appliances
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB), a new product which aims to ensure high availability and scalability for network appliances.

The product ‘makes it easy and cost-effective to deploy, scale and manage the availability of third-party virtual appliances such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and deep packet inspection systems in the cloud’, according to the company. Channy Yun, principal developer advocate for AWS, added that GWLB will have the same benefits for custom appliances, such as data analytics, telecoms and IoT among others.

AWS unveiled Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Ingress Routing last year to allow routing of all incoming and outgoing traffic from an internet or virtual private gateway to the interface of a specific EC2 instance. This enabled organisations to configure their VPC to an EC2 instance which specifically ran network security tools to perform traffic inspection or block suspicious activity.

Yun noted a specific example of how the product worked to ensure high availability. “You can use the advanced routing capabilities of GWLB to direct traffic to only healthy appliances, and reroute traffic when an appliance becomes unhealthy due to faults,” he wrote.

“The ability to use GWLB across user accounts enables partners to offer their virtual appliances as an AWS-hosted service that customers access from their VPCs,” Yun added. This reduces complexity and improves security.”

AWS posted record-breaking revenues of $11.6 billion (£8.94bn) for its most recent quarter at the end of last month. Earlier this month, the company announced plans to launch a data centre region in Switzerland, taking its total number of geographic regions to 24.

The load balancer tool is available in US East (N Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland, South America (Sao Paulo) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.

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