Explore the final 2025 release of ZoneHero featuring IP target groups for Kubernetes, comprehensive API enhancements, and improved reliability across the platform.

We’re excited to announce the release of ZoneHero 2025.3, the final release of 2025! This release brings significant improvements to platform reliability, expands our Kubernetes integration capabilities, and enhances monitoring features to give you better visibility into your infrastructure.

🆕 What’s New in 2025.3

IP-Based Target Groups for Kubernetes

Hero Load Balancers now support IP-type target groups, making it significantly easier to target Kubernetes and EKS clusters:

• Direct IP targeting IP target type is required when target Pods are running on Fargate or Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes. We’ve solved the challenge of determining which AZ an IP belongs to, enabling our cross-AZ traffic avoidance mechanism to work seamlessly with IP targets
• Foundation for advanced K8s features - Full Kubernetes support with routing, filtering, and authentication capabilities coming in 2026!

Simply configure your target groups with target_type = "ip" and ZoneHero handles the rest automatically.

API Improvements

We’ve made comprehensive improvements to the HLB API to prevent misuse and improve reliability:

• Listener limits per load balancer - Users can no longer deploy an unlimited number of listeners per load balancer
• Unique port/protocol enforcement - Ports and protocols must now be unique per load balancer
• Orphan prevention - Load balancers can no longer be deleted while leaving listeners behind
• Enhanced error reporting - The API now provides clearer, more actionable error messages to help you troubleshoot issues faster
• Improved error handling in CLI, library, and Terraform provider for better user experience

Envoy Proxy Upgrade to v1.36

We’ve upgraded our underlying Envoy proxy to version 1.36 from 1.34 (minor revisions are always applied regardless of ZoneHero HLB releases):

• Full upstream C++20 support - As anticipated with v1.35, Envoy now has complete C++20 support, which has significantly reduced our patch-set size!
• Latest security patches and CVE fixes
• Performance improvements from upstream Envoy development
• Enhanced stability with two minor version improvements

Enhanced Monitoring and Observability

Better insights into your load balancer performance:

• Cross-AZ statistics now available in metrics pushed to CloudWatch
• Improved visibility into availability zone distribution and performance
• Better troubleshooting with more granular metrics

Cross-Region Access Log Delivery

Improved cross-region access-log delivery to S3:

• More reliable log delivery across AWS regions
• Better performance for multi-region deployments
• Enhanced logging configuration options

Bug Fixes

• Fixed launch template cleanup - Resolved a bug where launch templates could be left behind in customers’ accounts when load balancers were deleted

🚀 Getting Started

This new release comes with no breaking changes and all users will be upgraded to the new version requiring no action on their part.

To start using the new IP target group features and benefit from enhanced API validation, upgrade the Terraform provider to the latest version: v1.3.0.

🎯 What’s Coming in 2026

We’re already planning exciting features for 2026:

• Full Kubernetes support with advanced routing, filtering, and authentication capabilities
• Enhanced WASM capabilities for edge computing and custom processing
• Source IP preservation for UDP flows
• Additional monitoring integrations beyond AWS CloudWatch

Have questions about ZoneHero 2025.3? Check our documentation or contact our Support Team for assistance with the new features.