AWS Gateway Load Balancer
AWS Gateway Load Balancer is a managed service that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of third-party virtual appliances, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and deep packet inspection tools, in AWS. It operates at the network layer (Layer 3) and transparently routes traffic to these appliances for inspection and processing before forwarding it to its destination. This service integrates with AWS Elastic Load Balancing to provide high availability and automatic scaling for the appliances.
Developers should use AWS Gateway Load Balancer when they need to deploy and manage security or network appliances in AWS for tasks like traffic inspection, threat detection, or compliance monitoring, as it eliminates the operational overhead of scaling and managing these appliances manually. It is particularly useful in architectures requiring consistent security policies across multiple VPCs or for applications with high traffic volumes that need scalable security solutions. For example, it can be used to inspect all inbound and outbound traffic for a web application hosted on EC2 instances.