Episode 43 — Application Gateways: what they do beyond routing and firewalling
Application gateways show up in CloudNetX scenarios when traffic decisions must be made with application context rather than only IP and port, and this episode explains what they add beyond routing and firewalling. It defines an application gateway as a Layer 7-aware control point that can terminate and re-establish connections, perform request-based routing, and apply policy based on hostnames, paths, headers, and other application attributes. The first paragraph focuses on why this matters: traditional routing forwards traffic without understanding the application, and firewalls often enforce policies primarily on network attributes, while application gateways can make decisions that align directly to how web and API traffic behaves. The episode also explains common capabilities such as health checks, TLS termination, and path-based routing, framing them as tools to improve resilience and enforce consistent access behavior at the application boundary.
