Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
Create a Network Load Balancer in the public subnet of the application’s VPC to route the traffic to the appliance for packet inspection.
Create an Application Load Balancer in the public subnet of the application’s VPC to route the traffic to the appliance for packet inspection.
Deploy a transit gateway in the inspection VPC. Configure route tables to route the incoming packets through the transit gateway.
Deploy a Gateway Load Balancer in the inspection VPC. Create a Gateway Load Balancer endpoint to receive the incoming packets and forward the packets to the appliance.
Explanations:
A Network Load Balancer routes traffic at the connection level (Layer 4) but does not inherently provide packet inspection features. It would not effectively integrate with the third-party firewall appliance for thorough inspection of application-level traffic.
An Application Load Balancer operates at Layer 7, but like the Network Load Balancer, it does not route traffic to a virtual appliance for inspection. It is designed to distribute traffic to multiple targets but does not facilitate the packet inspection required before reaching the web servers.
A transit gateway connects VPCs and on-premises networks but does not directly facilitate packet inspection by a third-party appliance. This option may add complexity and operational overhead, as it requires additional configuration for routing traffic through the transit gateway, which is not optimized for inspection use cases.
A Gateway Load Balancer is specifically designed to integrate with virtual appliances for traffic inspection. It provides a simple way to deploy, scale, and manage virtual appliances while transparently handling the packet forwarding necessary for inspection. This option offers the least operational overhead by directly routing incoming traffic to the firewall appliance for inspection before it reaches the web servers.