Amazon Web Services Inc. announced general availability today of a new service that it says makes it easier for customers to use outside virtual network appliances on its cloud infrastructure.

AWS Gateway Load Balancer makes it simple and cost-effective to deploy, scale and manage virtual appliances such as firewalls or network monitoring systems in the cloud, the company said.

The service is designed to complement Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud Ingress Routing service that was introduced last year. Amazon VPC Ingress Routing allows customers to route their incoming and outgoing network traffic to and from an internet gateway or virtual private gateway to the Elastic Network Interface of a specific Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance.

The benefit of doing this is that it directs all network traffic to an EC2 instance that runs network security tools to inspect or block suspicious network traffic, and perform other inspection tasks, before the traffic is relayed to other EC2 instances the customer is using.

VPC Ingress Routing makes it easy for customers to add virtual appliances to their network, but AWS Principal Developer Advocate Channy Yun said that ensuring high availability and scalability of those appliances is more challenging.

“Customers have to either over-provision appliances to handle peak load and high availability, or they have to manually scale up and down the appliances based on traffic, or use other ancillary tools – all of which increases operational overhead and costs,” Yun wrote in a blog post.

Gateway Load Balancer makes life easier by providing a single gateway for distributing traffic evenly through the network and scaling virtual appliances up and down, based on demand, Yun said. The benefit is that it eliminates various potential points of failure in the network, increasing availability, he explained.

The service supports the following kinds of load balancers:

Customers can choose from a selection of third-party virtual appliances that are sold directly in the AWS Marketplace, and test them out before buying. The service also streamlines the deployment process, helping customers to get more value from each virtual appliance faster than before.

Yun said AWS Gateway Load Balancer is available now in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), South America (São Paulo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.

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