Choosing Instance Type and Sizing

There are a range of specifications to choose from and this page will help guide through those choices.

Supported EC2 Instance Types

An instance type will depend on the expected network throughput as well as the types of services the Netgate® appliance will provide.

For general firewall appliances that do not require high throughput, t3 amd64 AWS product instances are General Purpose Burstable Performance Instances that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline. Businesses looking for higher VPN throughput while keeping costs manageable should consider arm64/Graviton instances.

Tip

If the appliance will provide advanced services like web proxying, IDS/IPS, or Server Load Balancing, consider an instance that provides more CPU and RAM, such as a large or xlarge subtype.

The list of supported EC2 instance types are available on the product pages for either the amd64 AWS product or the arm64/Graviton AWS product.

Sizing the EBS Volume

The Netgate appliance is only supported with EBS storage. For general purpose firewalls, storage requirements will typically be small and the default 8GB general purpose SSD volume should be more than enough.

In situations where the appliance may provide web proxying or caching to users, or other advanced features, consider increasing the volume size to something more appropriate, for example 64GB.