Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB)
Learn how Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) helps you easily and at scale integrate traffic inspection tools like firewalls or IDS into your AWS network.
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If we’ve ever needed to inspect, monitor, or filter traffic flowing between resources in the AWS environment, we know how complex it can get, especially when scaling across multiple VPCs. Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) is a purpose-built solution that makes deep packet inspection possible, streamlined, and scalable.
In this lesson, we’ll explore why GWLB is a powerful tool for network security and compliance, how it works under the hood using encapsulation and endpoints, and when to choose it over other inspection strategies like traffic mirroring.
Why does Gateway Load Balancer matter?
Before GWLB, developers and network architects often relied on Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Network Load Balancer (NLB) for routing and load distribution. While these services are robust for their intended use cases, they fall short regarding advanced traffic inspection.
ALB operates at layer 7 and is optimized for HTTP/S-based traffic for web applications that need content-based routing. However, it terminates the request and cannot transparently forward traffic for deep inspection.
NLB, on the other hand, works at layer 4 and offers ultra-low latency performance. It supports TCP and UDP traffic but lacks mechanisms for embedding metadata or enabling transparent, inline inspection. There’s also no built-in support for encapsulating traffic for routing through third-party appliances.
GWLB solves these limitations by operating at layer 3 and using ...