AWS Load Balancer -Gateway Load Balancer

Explained about Gateway Load Balancer and its Key Components

Hello Readers, As the name itself says it's a Gateway, imagine you have a lot of people trying to enter a building through different doors. Some doors might get crowded while others are empty.

A gateway load balancer is like a smart organizer that directs people to different doors so that no single door gets too crowded. This helps in keeping things running smoothly and ensures that everyone can enter the building without any problems.

Similarly, a gateway load balancer directs internet traffic to different parts of a network, making sure no part gets overwhelmed and everything stays working well.

“A Gateway Load Balancer that helps distribute incoming traffic across multiple resources, such as virtual machines, containers, or IP addresses, within a specific region. It operates at the network layer (Layer 4) of the OSI model, meaning it can handle TCP and UDP traffic.”

Key features of Gateway Load Balancer typically include:

1. Listeners: Listeners are the entry points for your load balancer. They define the protocol and port on which the load balancer will listen for incoming traffic. For example, you might have a listener configured to accept HTTPS traffic on port 443.
2. Target Groups: Target groups are collections of targets (such as EC2 instances, IP addresses, or network interfaces) that receive traffic from the load balancer. Each listener is associated with a target group, and the load balancer routes incoming traffic to the targets in the corresponding target group based on its routing configuration.
3. Health Checks: Health checks are used to monitor the health of the targets within a target group. The load balancer periodically sends health checks to each target to ensure that it’s functioning properly. If a target fails a health check, it’s temporarily removed from the load balancer’s pool of available targets until it becomes healthy again.
4. Security Groups: Security groups are used to control the traffic that’s allowed to reach the targets behind the load balancer. You can configure security groups to allow traffic only from specific IP addresses or ranges, helping to improve the security of your application.
5. Routing Configuration: Routing configuration determines how traffic should be distributed among the targets within a target group. This could involve simple round-robin routing.
6. Access Logs: Access logs provide detailed information about the requests that are received by the load balancer, including the source IP address. Access logs can be useful for troubleshooting, performance monitoring, and security analysis.