Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions,
see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China
(PDF).
Virtual gateways
End of support notice: On September 30, 2026, Amazon will discontinue support for Amazon App Mesh. After September 30, 2026, you will no longer be able to access the Amazon App Mesh console or Amazon App Mesh resources. For more information, visit this blog post Migrating from Amazon App Mesh to Amazon ECS Service Connect.
A virtual gateway allows resources that are outside of your mesh to communicate to
resources that are inside of your mesh. The virtual gateway represents an Envoy proxy
running in an Amazon ECS service, in a Kubernetes service, or on an Amazon EC2 instance. Unlike a
virtual node, which represents Envoy running with an application, a virtual gateway
represents Envoy deployed by itself.
External resources must be able to resolve a DNS name to an IP address assigned to the
service or instance that runs Envoy. Envoy can then access all of the App Mesh configuration
for resources that are inside of the mesh. The configuration for handling the incoming
requests at the Virtual Gateway are specified using Gateway Routes.
A virtual gateway with a HTTP or HTTP2 listener rewrites the incoming request's
hostname to the Gateway Route target Virtual Service's name, and the matched prefix from
the Gateway Route is rewritten to /
, by default. For example, if you have
configured the Gateway route match prefix to /chapter
, and, if the incoming
request is /chapter/1
, the request would be rewritten to /1
.
To configure rewrites, refer to the Creating a
gateway route section from Gateway Routes.
When creating a virtual gateway, proxyConfiguration
and user
should not be configured.
To complete an end-to-end walkthrough, see Configuring Inbound Gateway.
Creating a virtual gateway
When creating a Virtual Gateway, you must add a namespace selector with a label to
identify the list of namespaces with which to associate Gateway Routes to the
created Virtual Gateway.
- Amazon Web Services Management Console
-
To create a virtual gateway using the Amazon Web Services Management Console
-
Open the App Mesh console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/appmesh/.
-
Choose the mesh in which you want to create the virtual gateway.
All of the meshes that you own and that have been shared with you are listed.
-
Choose Virtual gateways in the left
navigation.
-
Choose Create virtual gateway.
-
For Virtual gateway name, enter a name for
your virtual gateway.
-
(Optional, but recommended) Configure Client policy
defaults.
-
(Optional) Select Enforce TLS if you
want the gateway to only communicate with virtual services
using Transport Layer Security (TLS).
-
(Optional) For Ports, specify one or
more ports on which you want to enforce TLS communication
with virtual services.
-
For Validation method, select one of
the following options. The certificate that you specify must
already exist and meet specific requirements. For more
information, see Certificate requirements.
-
Amazon Private Certificate Authority hosting
– Select one or more existing
Certificates.
-
Envoy Secret Discovery
Service (SDS) hosting – Enter
the name of the secret that Envoy fetches using the
Secret Discovery Service.
-
Local file
hosting – Specify the path to
the Certificate chain file on
the file system where Envoy is deployed.
-
(Optional) Enter a Subject Alternative
Name. To add additional SANs, select
Add SAN. SANs must be FQDN or URI
formatted.
-
(Optional) Select Provide client
certificate and one of the options below to
provide a client certificate when a server requests it and
enable mutual TLS authentication. To learn more about mutual
TLS, see the App Mesh Mutual
TLS Authentication docs.
-
Envoy Secret Discovery
Service (SDS) hosting – Enter
the name of the secret that Envoy fetches using the
Secret Discovery Service.
-
Local file
hosting – Specify the path to
the Certificate chain file, as
well as the Private key, on the
file system where Envoy is deployed. For a complete,
end-to-end walk through of deploying a mesh with a
sample application using encryption with local
files, see Configuring TLS with File Provided TLS
Certificates on GitHub.
(Optional) To configure logging, selected
Logging. Enter the HTTP access
logs path that you want Envoy to use. We recommend
the /dev/stdout
path so that you can use Docker
log drivers to export your Envoy logs to a service such as
Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
Logs must still be ingested by an agent in your application
and sent to a destination. This file path only instructs Envoy
where to send the logs.
-
Configure the Listener.
-
Select a Protocol and specify the
Port on which Envoy listens for
traffic. The http listener permits
connection transition to websockets. You can click Add Listener to add multiple
listeners. The Remove
button will remove that listener.
(Optional) Enable connection pool
Connection pooling limits the number of connections that
the Virtual Gateway Envoy can concurrently establish. It is
intended to protect your Envoy instance from being
overwhelmed with connections and lets you adjust traffic
shaping for the needs of your applications.
You can configure destination-side connection pool
settings for a virtual gateway listener. App Mesh sets the
client-side connection pool settings to infinite by default,
simplifying mesh configuration.
The connectionPool
and
connectionPool
portMapping protocols
must be the same. If your listener protocol is
grpc
or http2
, specify
maxRequests
only. If your listener
protocol is http
, you can specify both
maxConnections
and
maxPendingRequests
.
-
For Maximum connections,
specify the maximum number of outbound
connections.
-
For Maximum requests, specify
maximum number of parallel requests that can be
established with the Virtual Gateway Envoy.
-
(Optional) For Maximum pending
requests, specify the number of
overflowing requests after Maximum
connections that an Envoy queues. The
default value is 2147483647
.
(Optional) If you want to configure a health check for
your listener, then select Enable health
check.
A health check policy is optional, but if you specify any
values for a health policy, then you must specify values for
Healthy threshold, Health
check interval, Health check
protocol, Timeout
period, and Unhealthy
threshold.
-
For Health check protocol,
choose a protocol. If you select
grpc, then your service must
conform to the GRPC Health Checking Protocol.
-
For Health check port,
specify the port that the health check should run
on.
-
For Healthy threshold,
specify the number of consecutive successful health
checks that must occur before declaring the listener
healthy.
-
For Health check interval,
specify the time period in milliseconds between each
health check execution.
-
For Path, specify the
destination path for the health check request. This
value is only used if the Health check
protocol is http
or
http2
. The value is ignored for other
protocols.
-
For Timeout period, specify
the amount of time to wait when receiving a response
from the health check in milliseconds.
-
For Unhealthy threshold,
specify the number of consecutive failed health
checks that must occur before declaring the listener
unhealthy.
(Optional) If you want to specify whether clients
communicate with this virtual gateway using TLS, then select
Enable TLS termination.
-
For Mode, select the mode
that you want TLS to be configured for on the
listener.
-
For Certificate method,
select one of the following options. The certificate
must meet specific requirements. For more
information, see Certificate requirements.
-
Amazon Certificate Manager hosting
– Select an existing
Certificate.
-
Envoy Secret Discovery
Service (SDS) hosting – Enter
the name of the secret that Envoy fetches using
the Secret Discovery Service.
-
Local file hosting
– Specify the path to the
Certificate chain and
Private key files on the file
system where Envoy is deployed.
-
(Optional) Select Require
client certificate and one of the
options below to enable mutual TLS authentication if
the client provides a certificate. To learn more
about mutual TLS, see the App Mesh Mutual TLS Authentication docs.
-
Envoy Secret Discovery
Service (SDS) hosting – Enter
the name of the secret that Envoy fetches using
the Secret Discovery Service.
-
Local file
hosting – Specify the path to
the Certificate chain file on
the file system where Envoy is deployed.
-
(Optional) Enter a Subject Alternative
Name. To add additional SANs, select
Add SAN. SANs must be FQDN or
URI formatted.
-
Choose Create virtual gateway to
finish.
- Amazon CLI
-
To create a virtual gateway using the
Amazon CLI.
Create a virtual gateway using the following command and input JSON
(replace the red
values with your own):
-
aws appmesh create-virtual-gateway \
--mesh-name meshName
\
--virtual-gateway-name virtualGatewayName
\
--cli-input-json file://create-virtual-gateway.json
-
Contents of example
create-virtual-gateway.json:
{
"spec": {
"listeners": [
{
"portMapping": {
"port": 9080,
"protocol": "http"
}
}
]
}
}
-
Example output:
{
"virtualGateway": {
"meshName": "meshName",
"metadata": {
"arn": "arn:aws:appmesh:us-west-2
:123456789012:mesh/meshName/virtualGateway/virtualGatewayName",
"createdAt": "2022-04-06T10:42:42.015000-05:00",
"lastUpdatedAt": "2022-04-06T10:42:42.015000-05:00",
"meshOwner": "123456789012",
"resourceOwner": "123456789012",
"uid": "a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-11111EXAMPLE",
"version": 1
},
"spec": {
"listeners": [
{
"portMapping": {
"port": 9080,
"protocol": "http"
}
}
]
},
"status": {
"status": "ACTIVE"
},
"virtualGatewayName": "virtualGatewayName"
}
}
For more information on creating a virtual gateway with the Amazon CLI for
App Mesh, see the create-virtual-gateway command in the Amazon CLI reference.
Deploy virtual gateway
Deploy an Amazon ECS or Kubernetes service that contains only the Envoy container. You can also deploy the Envoy container on an Amazon EC2
instance. For more information, see Getting started with App Mesh
and Amazon EC2. For more information on how to deploy on Amazon ECS see Getting started with App Mesh and Amazon ECS or Getting started with
Amazon App Mesh and Kubernetes to deploy to Kubernetes. You need to set the
APPMESH_RESOURCE_ARN
environment variable to
mesh/mesh-name
/virtualGateway/virtual-gateway-name
and you must not specify proxy configuration so that the proxy's traffic doesn't get
redirected to itself. By default, App Mesh uses the name of the resource you specified in
APPMESH_RESOURCE_ARN
when Envoy is referring to itself in metrics and
traces. You can override this behavior by setting the APPMESH_RESOURCE_CLUSTER
environment variable with your own name.
We recommend that you deploy multiple instances of the container and set up a Network
Load Balancer to load balance traffic to the instances. The service discovery name of
the load balancer is the name that you want external services to use to access resources
that are in the mesh, such as myapp.example.com
. For more
information see Creating a
Network Load Balancer (Amazon ECS), Creating an External Load Balancer (Kubernetes), or Tutorial: Increase the availability of your application on Amazon EC2. You can
also find more examples and walkthroughs in our App Mesh examples.
Enable proxy authorization for Envoy. For more information, see Envoy Proxy authorization.
Deleting a virtual gateway
- Amazon Web Services Management Console
-
To delete a virtual gateway using the Amazon Web Services Management Console
-
Open the App Mesh console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/appmesh/.
-
Choose the mesh from which you want to delete a virtual gateway.
All of the meshes that you own and that have been shared with you are listed.
-
Choose Virtual gateways in the left
navigation.
-
Choose the virtual gateway that you want to delete and select
Delete. You cannot delete a virtual gateway
if it has any associated gateway routes. You must delete any
associated gateway routes first. You can only delete a virtual
gateway where your account is listed as Resource
owner.
-
In the confirmation box, type delete
and
then select Delete.
- Amazon CLI
-
To delete a virtual gateway using the Amazon CLI
-
Use the following command to delete your virtual gateway (replace
the red
values with your own):
aws appmesh delete-virtual-gateway \
--mesh-name meshName
\
--virtual-gateway-name virtualGatewayName
-
Example output:
{
"virtualGateway": {
"meshName": "meshName",
"metadata": {
"arn": "arn:aws:appmesh:us-west-2
:123456789012:mesh/meshName/virtualGateway/virtualGatewayName",
"createdAt": "2022-04-06T10:42:42.015000-05:00",
"lastUpdatedAt": "2022-04-07T10:57:22.638000-05:00",
"meshOwner": "123456789012",
"resourceOwner": "123456789012",
"uid": "a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-11111EXAMPLE",
"version": 2
},
"spec": {
"listeners": [
{
"portMapping": {
"port": 9080,
"protocol": "http"
}
}
]
},
"status": {
"status": "DELETED"
},
"virtualGatewayName": "virtualGatewayName"
}
}
For more information on deleting a virtual gateway with the Amazon CLI for
App Mesh, see the delete-virtual-gateway command in the Amazon CLI reference.