Network Firewall

💡 Definition

AWS Network Firewall is a managed, stateful network firewall and intrusion detection and prevention service for your VPC. It provides extra protection for your VPC traffic.

🔑 Key Concepts

• Managed Service: High availability and scalability are built-in.
• VPC Protection: Inspects traffic entering and leaving your VPC.
• Stateful Inspection: Can track the state of network connections.
• Intrusion Prevention (IPS): Detects and blocks vulnerability exploits.
• Web Filtering: Filters traffic based on domain names (URLs).

⚙️ How it Works

You deploy the Network Firewall into a dedicated subnet. You then update your VPC route tables to route traffic through the firewall endpoint for inspection.

🎯 Use Cases

• Filtering Outbound Traffic: Blocking access to known malicious domains.
• Deep Packet Inspection: Inspecting traffic payloads for threats.
• Compliance: Meeting regulatory requirements for network security.

💰 Pricing Model

• Endpoint: Hourly charge for each firewall endpoint.
• Data Processing: Charged per GB of data processed.

📝 Exam Tips (CLF-C02)

• A managed firewall service for VPC.
• More advanced than Security Groups and NACLs (supports URL filtering, IPS).
• Can be managed centrally via AWS Firewall Manager.

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See Also: * VPC * Security Group * WAF (Web Application Firewall - Layer 7)