pfSense Plus Software Earns AWS Foundational Technical Review Approval

Netgate pfSense Plus Software Now Approved By AWS Foundational Technical Review.

Netgate is pleased to announce the approval of pfSense Plus software under the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) process.

The FTR process is designed to allow AWS Partners, like Netgate, to confirm their development processes are aligned with AWS best practices around the areas of security, reliability, and operational excellence. These practices are designed to ensure the best possible customer experience when using Netgate products on AWS.

Why is the cloud important?

Businesses, institutions and organizations are increasingly migrating applications and workloads to the cloud. Whether they want to enjoy the ability to automatically scale capacity up and down, simplify their data storage needs, decrease capital expenditures, increase their global reach, or stop estimating capacity, there are many advantages of cloud usage. The opportunity to benefit from AWS economies of scale and simplify on-premises infrastructure are compelling reasons to make the switch.

pfSense Plus software is a popular Netgate security product that offers exceptional firewall, router and VPN capabilities. Many people are familiar with pfSense Plus software on Netgate security gateway appliances, but fewer people know pfSense Plus software is also available on the AWS cloud.

There are 3 popular use cases for running pfSense Plus software on the cloud:

1. Securely connecting on-premise infrastructure to the cloud
2. Protecting cloud-based applications and workloads
3. Providing secure access to or between cloud workloads and applications

Netgate approaches every development task with best practices and the customer experience in mind. As a result of passing the FTR process for pfSense Plus software, AWS recognizes Netgate for its technical expertise by elevating Netgate to the Validated Partner level. This confirms our development efforts and dedication to the customer experience as evidenced by our Resources Library and our Technical Assistance Center (TAC). Netgate continuously  updates detailed documentation for pfSense Plus software on AWS and offers 24x7 support to help customers. Plus, it is now easier than ever to find us on the AWS Partner Solutions Finder.

What is an FTR?

The FTR process serves to ensure that products running on AWS are developed in alignment with 6 guiding principles or best practices in mind:

1. Operational Excellence - focuses on continuous improvement of processes and procedures
2. Security - focuses on confidentiality and integrity of data
3. Reliability - focuses on performance as intended
4. Performance Efficiency - focuses on optimization of computing resources
5. Cost Optimization - focuses on resources over time without overspending
6. Sustainability - This newest concept focuses on a shared responsibility model for minimizing environmental impact when running workloads in the cloud.

These concepts are developed to provide the customer with the best possible user experience when using AWS Partner products on the cloud.

Benefits of pfSense Plus Software on AWS

pfSense Plus software has a number of benefits when operating on AWS:

• pfSense Plus software has a built-in wizard for configuring VPN connections to any Virtual Private Cloud(s) (VPC) you may be using on AWS. This can be useful for quickly connecting an on-premises (non-AWS) pfSense instance to a VPC on AWS:

• An additional benefit of using pfSense software on AWS involves the number of VPN connections required. With pfSense Plus software, there are no additional charges for individual connections, there is a simple, all-inclusive, hourly charge for pfSense based on the size of the EC2  instance selected. Users should consider this vs other options on the AWS cloud that may charge by both the number of VPN connections and by the hour.
• In August we reviewed how users can benefit from the pfSense Plus software network address translation (NAT) service as an alternative to the NAT gateways offered by AWS. Depending on the specific usage, this can save customers a significant amount of money over other products. 

It is important to understand that these features, plus many more are included with pfSense Plus software. There are no additional, or “add-on” costs when using pfSense Plus software on the AWS cloud.

Netgate makes it easy to try pfSense Plus software on the AWS cloud with our free 30 trial! Please note that the trial does not include the costs of the AWS VM instance, but interested parties can choose a smaller EC2 instance type to build familiarity with pfSense Plus software on AWS.