Managing your own rule groups in AWS Network Firewall

Follow the guidance in this section to manage your AWS Network Firewall rule groups.

How Network Firewall propagates your changes

When you make any changes to a firewall, including changes to any of the firewall's components, like rule groups, TLS inspection configurations, and firewall policies, Network Firewall propagates the changes everywhere that the firewall is used. Your changes are applied within seconds, but there might be a brief period of inconsistency when the changes have arrived in some places and not in others. For example, if you modify a rule group so that it drops an additional type of packet, for a firewall that uses the rule group, the new packet type might briefly be dropped by one firewall endpoint while still being allowed by another.

This temporary inconsistency can occur when you first create a firewall and when you make changes to an existing firewall. Generally, any inconsistencies of this type last only a few seconds.

When you add a TLS inspection configuration to an existing firewall, Network Firewall interrupts traffic flows that match the criteria defined by the TLS inspection configuration scope configuration. Network Firewall will begin SSL/TLS decryption and inspection for new connections to the firewall.

Changes to stateful rules are applied only to new traffic flows. Other firewall changes, including changes to stateless rules, are applied to all network packets.

Setting rule group capacity in AWS Network Firewall

AWS Network Firewall uses capacity settings to calculate and manage the processing requirements for its rules groups and firewall policies. Each rule group must have a capacity setting that's fixed at creation. When you reference a rule group from a firewall policy, Network Firewall reserves the rule group's capacity in the policy, increasing the total capacity that's used by the policy.

Using the consumed capacity fields in the console, you can also describe a rule group or a policy to find out how much of the rule group or policy capacity is currently in use.

For information about the maximum capacity settings for rule groups and firewall policies, see AWS Network Firewall quotas.

You can't change or exceed a rule group's capacity when you make changes to it, so when you set the rule group's capacity, leave room for it to grow.

Stateless rule group capacity

Estimate a stateless rule group's capacity as the sum of the capacities of the rules that you expect to have in it.

The capacity required for a single rule is the product of the complexity values of all of its match settings.

The following lists example calculations of stateless rule capacity requirements.

To calculate the capacity of a rule group, add the capacity requirements of all rules that you expect to have in the rule group during its lifetime. You can't change this setting after you create the rule group.

The maximum capacity setting for a stateless rule group is 30,000.

Stateful rule group capacity

Estimate a stateful rule group's capacity as the number of rules that you expect to have in it during its lifetime. You can't change this setting after you create the rule group.

The maximum capacity setting for a stateful rule group is 30,000.