Written by Annie Fang, Program Manager
Previously, we announced the public preview release of Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB), a new SKU of Azure Load Balancer targeted for transparent NVA (network virtual appliance) insertion supported by a growing list of NVA providers. Today, placing NVAs in the path of traffic is a growing need for customers as their workloads scale. Common use cases of NVAs we’ve seen are:
- Allowing or blocking specific IPs using virtual firewalls.
- Protecting applications from DDoS attacks.
- Analyzing or visualizing traffic patterns.
And GWLB now offers the following benefits for NVA scenarios:
- Source IP preservation.
- Flow symmetry.
- Lightweight NVA management at scale.
- Auto-scaling with Azure Virtual Machines Scale Sets (VMSS).
With GWLB, bump-in-the-wire service chaining becomes easy to add on to new or existing architectures in Azure. This means customers can easily “chain” a new GWLB resource to both Standard Public Load Balancers and individual virtual machines with Standard Public IPs, covering scenarios involving both highly available, zonally resilient deployments and simpler workloads.
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