DigitalOcean releases free cloud firewalls service to strengthen security for large-scale applications

DigitalOcean on Wednesday announced the launch of Cloud Firewalls, a free service that secures Droplets (cloud servers) by reducing the surface area of a potential attack.

Developers can deploy the service in seconds without installing or configuring any software, and define what ports are visible on their Droplets to minimize risk. Along with DigitalOcean's free Monitoring Service launched in April 2017, Cloud Firewalls is a key part of DigitalOcean's continuous effort to add value back to developers by allowing them to deploy and scale applications of any size.

"We are committed to helping developers build great software. This includes offering a simple and automated way to secure their infrastructure," said CTO DigitalOcean, Julia Austin.

"Teams of engineers depend on DigitalOcean to stay true to our commitment to simplicity, and Cloud Firewalls ensures they can easily manage their production workloads securely, at scale," added Austin.

Developers with a large number of Droplets will find it much easier to secure their applications with Cloud Firewalls. It scales automatically from one Droplet to thousands and provides a central location to define and apply access rules to prevent unauthorized traffic from reaching them. Users can leverage tagging to group and organize any number of Droplets, and use them to define how each group of Droplets is secured.

Cloud Firewalls gives users the ability to whitelist which ports are open and which IP ranges, tags, Droplets or load balancers can access them. Users can configure the service easily and quickly through the dashboard or on the command line with doctl.

They can also leverage DigitalOcean's API to automate tasks and build integrations. Official client libraries are available in Go and Ruby. Rules can be changed in one place and instantly applied to every Droplet that is tagged and the service is available in every region to all Droplet customers at no additional cost.