Can You Get Better Value For Money From AWS?

Today, we are launching IPFire on AWS ARM-based instances, making IPFire cheaper, more versatile and more secure for all your cloud-based projects.

Having been around for a little while, Lightning Wire Labs ported IPFire to the new ARM-based processors from AWS with IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 159.

The cloud is here to stay. Lightning Wire Labs proudly has a large customer base with large cloud envirtonments secured by IPFire.

One common question, we are getting often is How to reduce cost? Although running your setup in the cloud gives you a lot of flexibility, this does not come for free. As companies grow, more resources are required driving up costs, and with more financial pressure on most businesses due to the pandemic, reducing cloud spend is more important than ever.

With IPFire already being free of any license cost, the biggest opportunity to save money on the firewall is to use a smaller instance size. However, since IPFire does not use a lot of resources, a certain amount of oomph is required to keep your hosted services fast for your customers and to shift Gigabits of data.

AWS new ARM instances based on their new Graviton 2 processors come with more performance for a smaller price. Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of that?

For application as a firewall, the T4g, M6g and C6g instances have many advantages:

• Faster processing power which decreases latency on the network
• Cryptographic acceleration for more throughput over VPNs, easily saturating a multi-gigabit link
• Using lightweight virtualisation, IOMMU and DMA allows for less virtualisation overhead which decreases processor usage when handling network packets and giving the system time to care about other things
• ARM processors are less likely to be vulnerable for any speculation attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown, giving you a little bit of extra security in the cloud
• Giving an overall 40% better price performance compared to x86-based instances

IPFire in the cloud brings all the features that cost a lot of extra money to AWS without extra charge. Setting up VPNs to connect to your on-premise firewall in the office, or securely connecting your staff to the servers they are working on. Hosting services for your clients and protecting your web applications against attackers using the Intrusion Protection System. There are many opportunities and they have now become more affordable for everyone.

Read more about IPFire in the cloud on our product page.