AWS Gateway Load Balancer

[aidansteele]

AWS have an offering called the Gateway Load Balancer. Pricing is based on the GWLB itself and GWLB endpoints (GWLBe). Both have per-hour and per-GB costs.

A single GWLB can be deployed to multiple AZs (just like an LB) and GWLBes are AZ-specific. So for a single AZ it would cost $0.0225/hr. Per-GB it would be an extra $0.0075 - this is assuming costs are dominated by bandwidth and not the other GLCU units (active connections and new connections).

As per tweet the main benefits would be high availability within each AZ (via multiple instances behind a GWLBe) and the ability for connection draining.

There is even a recent blog post demonstrating exactly how this could be achieved. It is the "2-arm" mode that would most closely mirror how alterNAT works today.

[eddycek]

Hi @aidansteele I was looking at a blog post from AWS and it looks interesting, but not production ready. By any chance is there already some demo with alternat?

[bwhaley]

@eddycek Are you asking for a demo of alterNAT as it is now (with NAT instances) or a demo of a version with GWLB? If the former, there is a demo of alterNAT in this video.

[eddycek]

@bwhaley Sorry, I meant the alterNAT demo with GWLB. Otherwise I've seen the video and it's excellent, but I can't afford to close all open connections during a patch instances.

[bwhaley]

This is an interesting idea and may well be useful for some users, but probably not for alterNAT. Going to close this but anyone who wants to tackle it in the future should reply here so we can check it out!

[nitrocode]

Would the gateway load balancer avoid needing to manage ips in the route table via the lambda? If so, then it would eliminate the issue of closed tcp connections during a scaling or max refresh event.

[eddycek]

Would the gateway load balancer avoid needing to manage ips in the route table via the lambda? If so, then it would eliminate the issue of closed tcp connections during a scaling or max refresh event.

Yes it's right. The question is, how much would the price of operating the alternat with LB vs manage NAT increase.