Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) plug-in applies firewalls to
OpenStack objects such as projects, routers, and router ports.

The central concepts with OpenStack firewalls are the notions of a firewall
policy and a firewall rule. A policy is an ordered collection of rules. A rule
specifies a collection of attributes (such as port ranges, protocol, and IP
addresses) that constitute match criteria and an action to take (allow or deny)
on matched traffic. A policy can be made public, so it can be shared across
projects.

Firewalls are implemented in various ways, depending on the driver used. For
example, an iptables driver implements firewalls using iptable rules. An
OpenVSwitch driver implements firewall rules using flow entries in flow tables.

FWaaS v2
--------

The newer FWaaS implementation, v2, provides a much more granular service.
The notion of a firewall has been replaced with firewall group to indicate
that a firewall consists of two policies: an ingress policy and an egress
policy. A firewall group is applied not at the router level (all ports on a
router) but at the port level. Currently, router ports can be specified. For
Ocata, VM ports can also be specified.

FWaaS v1
--------

FWaaS v1 was deprecated in the Newton cycle and removed entirely in the Stein
cycle.

FWaaS Feature Matrix
---------------------

The following table shows FWaaS v2 features.

+------------------------------------------+-----------+
| Feature                                  | Supported |
+==========================================+===========+
| Supports L3 firewalling for routers      | NO*       |
+------------------------------------------+-----------+
| Supports L3 firewalling for router ports | YES       |
+------------------------------------------+-----------+
| Supports L2 firewalling (VM ports)       | YES       |
+------------------------------------------+-----------+
| CLI support                              | YES       |
+------------------------------------------+-----------+
| Horizon support                          | YES       |
+------------------------------------------+-----------+

\* A firewall group can be applied to all ports on a given router in order to
effect this.

For further information, see the
`FWaaS v2 configuration guide <./fwaas-v2-scenario.html>`_.
