Easily secure NodeBalancers with Cloud Firewall (Techatty)

NodeBalancers now support a seamless Cloud Firewall integration, making it easier than ever to securely scale your application with Akamai cloud computing services. 

As traffic and/or the user base grows for an application, developers and infrastructure engineers distribute the load among multiple compute instances to maintain performance and high availability. This is done with our NodeBalancer service, a managed load balancer virtual machine that operates as a layer 4-7 proxy to distribute traffic to select healthy backend nodes in the same core compute region.

With the new integration, you can set up a free Cloud Firewall with custom inbound traffic rules and attach to your NodeBalancer so it both filters and distributes allowed incoming traffic to your application’s compute instances. Filtering at the load balancer level creates another layer of protection for your application, ensuring malicious traffic is immediately blocked from reaching backend nodes.

How It Works

Configure your Cloud Firewall using Cloud Manager or the API. This is a free service that supports up to 25 custom firewall rules to block or allow inbound traffic from designated IP addresses or IP ranges, including specified ports. Configure rules for SSH, HTTP, HTTPS, MySQL, and DNS traffic and specify the traffic protocol (TCP, UDP, ICMP, and IPENCAP).

You can easily add a NodeBalancer and corresponding Cloud Firewall at the same time or asynchronously.

You can also modify or delete Cloud Firewall rules as needed to quickly respond to changing traffic patterns.

Get started now or browse updated Cloud Firewall and NodeBalancer documentation.

Coming Soon: Beta for Global Load Balancer

We’re improving our load balancing solution to distribute traffic between virtual machines in more than one core compute region! Global Load Balancer is a multi-region and multicloud-friendly load balancer that distributes both East-West and North-South traffic between healthy compute instances.

Register for the upcoming beta in Cloud Manager or via the API. If you’re Interested in testing the Global Load Balancer but don’t have an account, create your account now and receive $100 in free credit to explore the platform while you wait.