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Beforehand, we introduced the general public preview launch of Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB), a brand new SKU of Azure Load Balancer focused for clear NVA (community digital equipment) insertion supported by a rising listing of NVA suppliers. At this time, inserting NVAs within the path of visitors is a rising want for purchasers as their workloads scale. Frequent use instances of NVAs we’ve seen are:
- Permitting or blocking particular IPs utilizing digital firewalls.
- Defending purposes from DDoS assaults.
- Analyzing or visualizing visitors patterns.
And GWLB now provides the next advantages for NVA eventualities:
- Supply IP preservation.
- Circulate symmetry.
- Light-weight NVA administration at scale.
- Auto-scaling with Azure Digital Machines Scale Units (VMSS).
With GWLB, bump-in-the-wire service chaining turns into simple so as to add on to new or current architectures in Azure. This implies prospects can simply “chain” a brand new GWLB useful resource to each Customary Public Load Balancers and particular person digital machines with Customary Public IPs, protecting eventualities involving each extremely accessible, zonally resilient deployments and less complicated workloads.
Determine 1: GWLB might be related to a number of shopper assets, together with each Customary Public Load Balancers and Digital Machines with Customary Public IPs. When GWLB is chained to the front-end configuration or VM NIC IP configuration, unfiltered visitors from the web will first be directed to the GWLB after which attain the configured NVAs. The NVAs will then examine the visitors and ship the filtered visitors to the ultimate vacation spot, the buyer utility hosted on both the load balancer or digital machine.
What’s new with Gateway Load Balancer
GWLB borrows a majority of the identical ideas because the Customary Load Balancers that prospects are accustomed to right now. You’ll have many of the identical elements corresponding to frontend IPs, load balancing guidelines, backend swimming pools, well being probes, and metrics, however you’ll additionally see a brand new part distinctive to GWLB—VXLAN tunnel interfaces.
VXLAN is an encapsulation protocol utilized by GWLB. This enables visitors packets to be encapsulated and decapsulated with VXLAN headers as they traverse the suitable knowledge path, all whereas sustaining their authentic supply IP and circulate symmetry with out requiring Supply Community Handle Translation (SNAT) or different complicated configurations like user-defined routes (UDRs).
The VXLAN tunnel interfaces are configured as a part of the GWLB’s back-end pool and allow the NVAs to isolate “untrusted” visitors from “trusted” visitors. Tunnel interfaces can both be inner or exterior and every backend pool can have as much as two tunnel interfaces. Usually, the exterior interface is used for “untrusted” visitors—visitors coming from the web and headed to the equipment. Correspondingly, the inner interface is used for “trusted” visitors—visitors going out of your home equipment to your utility.
Contoso case research
To higher perceive the use case of GWLB, let’s dive deeper into instance retail firm Contoso’s use case.
Who’s Contoso?
Contoso is a retail firm that makes use of Azure Load Balancer right now to make their internet servers supporting their retail platform regionally resilient. Prior to now few years, they’ve skilled exponential progress and now serve over 20 million guests per thirty days. When confronted with the necessity to scale their retail platform, they selected Azure Load Balancer due to its excessive efficiency coupled with ultra-low latency. On account of their success, they’ve begun to undertake stricter safety practices to guard buyer transactions and cut back the chance of dangerous visitors reaching their platforms.
What does Contoso’s structure appear to be right now?
Considered one of their load balancers supporting the eastus area is known as contoso-eastus and has a front-end IP configuration with the general public IP 101.22.462. At this time, visitors headed to 101.22.462 on port 80 is distributed to the backend situations on port 80 as nicely.
What’s the issue?
The safety group just lately recognized some doubtlessly malicious IP addresses which were trying to entry their retail platform. In consequence, they’re trying to place a network-layer digital firewall to guard their purposes from IP addresses with poor reputations.
What’s the plan?
Contoso has determined to go together with a third-party NVA vendor whose home equipment the group has utilized in different contexts corresponding to smaller scale purposes or different internal-facing instruments. The safety group needs to maintain the creation of further assets to a minimal to simplify their NVA administration structure, in order that they determine map one GWLB with an auto-scaling backend pool of NVAs utilizing Azure VMSS to every group of load balancers deployed in the identical area.
Deploying Gateway Load Balancer
The cloud infrastructure group at Contoso creates a GWLB with their NVAs deployed utilizing Azure VMSS. Then, they chain this GWLB to their 5 Customary Public LBs for the eastus area. After verifying that their Knowledge Path Availability and Well being Probe Standing metrics are 100 p.c on each their GWLB and on every chained Customary Public LB, they run a fast packet seize to make sure all the pieces is working as anticipated.
What occurs now?
Now, visitors packets whose vacation spot are any of the frontend IPs of the Customary Public LBs for eastus can be encapsulated utilizing VXLAN and despatched to the GWLB first. At this level, the firewall NVAs will decapsulate the visitors, examine the supply IP, and decide whether or not this visitors is secure to proceed on in direction of the top utility. The NVA will then re-encapsulate visitors packets that meet the firewall’s standards and ship it again to the Customary LB. When the visitors reaches the Customary LB, the packets can be decapsulated, that means that the visitors will seem as if it got here straight from the web, with its authentic supply IP intact. That is what we imply by clear NVA insertion, as Contoso’s retail platform purposes will behave precisely as they did earlier than, with out ever realizing that the packet was inspected or filtered by a firewall equipment previous to reaching the applying server.
Gateway Load Balancer companions
Gateway Load Balancer helps quite a lot of NVA suppliers, you may be taught extra about every of our companions on our companions web page.
Digital firewalls
- Examine Level
- Cisco
- F5
- Fortinet
- Palo Alto Networks
Site visitors observability
- cPacket Networks
- Glasnostic
Community safety
- Citrix
- Development Micro
- Valtix
DDoS safety
Study extra
Check out Gateway Load Balancer right now with the assistance of our quickstart tutorials, or learn extra about Gateway Load Balancer on our public documentation.
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