Cloud support
Which firewalls take to the cloud best of all?
The IPFire wiki states that Lightning Labs offers a cloudbased instance of the firewall optimised to run on AWS (Amazon Web Services). Lightning Labs also offers instances with Exoscale, a Swiss-based cloud provider. Amazon estimates running costs at around $0.14 (11.6p) an hour, which puts running costs at around $100 (£83) per month. Lightning Labs claims the ARM image is less costly, though.
Alpine Linux offers a number of AWS cloud images in various locations, while hoping to support other major cloud providers in the future. Images are built using Alpine’s open source Alpine Cloud Images Builder, which means in theory you could create your own custom cloud builds.
VyOS is compatible with AWS and Google Cloud. You can run a free trial on AWS, but running costs are estimated at $0.30 (£0.25) per hour, which could get expensive. There’s also a trial version for Google Cloud and Azure Cloud services, as well as Oracle Cloud Services. You need to contact VyOS to get started.
According to the support forum, the Enterprise edition of Endian Firewall has been deployed on AWS in certain instances. It’s also technically possible to set up a virtual instance of the paid Endian UTM in a cloud instance, but there’s no official cloud image for the free Community edition.
According to the developers’ online documentation, ClearOS 7 is available as an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) and the website lists the Amazon ID to do so. Naturally, this means you already have an EC2 instance running. ClearOS has also been available in the Azure Marketplace for around six years.