All AWS Gateways in one place — with oneliners

What are Gateways?

A gateway is a network node that forms a passage between two networks operating with different transmission protocols. Gateways serve as an entry and exit point for a network as all data must pass through or communicate with the gateway before being routed.

Whenever you see the term Gateway, keep in mind that it simply refers to separate networks attempting to communicate or join in order to exchange data. Therefore, let’s move on to the many Gateways offered.

Note: The goal of this article is NOT to introduce gateways by use-case, but rather to bring them all together and provide a one-line coarse-grained definition (can not cover everything in one line).

Gateways are broadly grouped into three categories.:

Network Gateways

★ VPC Related — for AWS Internal Traffic

• Internet Gateway (IGW) — public instances to the internet
• NAT Gateway (NAT) — Private instances to the internet
• Gateway VPC endpoints** — Access specific AWS service via VPC
• Transit Gateway** — communicate across multiple VPCs

★ Direct connect(DX) related — for on-prem to Traffic

• Direct Connect gateway — on-prem to VPC or multiple VPCs
• Virtual private gateway — on-prem to multiple VPC mostly via VPN tunnels
• Customer Gateway — NOT on AWS but on customer premisses for DX connection

** Can be used with DX as well

Storage Gateways — for on-prem Storage

• Amazon S3 File Gateway — On-prem NFS to S3
• Amazon FSx File Gateway —for FSx systems but mostly for High-Performance Computing(HPC) use-cases
• Volume Gateway — most important, VM running on-prem to seamlessly connect to AWS for storage solution
• Tape Gateway — Mostly used for Tape archival storage mechanism

AWS Service Gateways

• API Gateway — To build HTTP, REST APIs. Serverless.

Further work

Based on the feedback and interest, I want to publish an article titled “All AWS Gateways in One Location — Detailed” in which I offer detailed information on each. This information is intended to be a resource for interviews, AWS Certification exams, and general reference.