We could choose to simply use iptables to configure the firewall rules if we wanted to, but both cannot co-exist with each other. It simplifies the way we manage firewall rules by classifying network traffic into different firewall zones. firewalld is a new way to interact with the netfilter subsystem in the Linux kernel. Now that we have justified using firewalld, let’s learn a bit more about it. In either case, depending on the security group state, he should be able to do so at the OS-level. Or perhaps the administrator wants to bind additional ports for future services or temporarily block certain ports, but does not have access to the EC2 dashboard. If, for instance, the firewall in the security group is configured incorrectly, the OS-level firewall can act as a backup to protect the instance from possible probes or compromise. You might wonder why we need to configure the firewall at the operating system level in the first place, if this is already taken care of by EC2 security groups within our VPC. By the way, I will not cover iptables here, as there are many good resources out there already. While Amazon Linux is similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in many ways, it does not yet support firewalld. In this article, we will look at configuring firewall rules via firewalld on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This is the second part of our server security series. While AWS EC2 instances should be well protected by VPC security tools, you may still need to implement protection at the OS-level, and that means firewalld.

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