What type of firewall solutions are primarily offered by native cloud platforms?

Native cloud platforms primarily offer Layer 4 (L4) firewalls as their standard firewall solutions. L4 firewalls operate at the transport layer of the OSI model, allowing them to manage and inspect traffic based on transport layer protocols such as TCP and UDP. This capability enables them to filter traffic by ports and protocols, providing essential functionalities like access control and traffic segmentation.

This is particularly important in native cloud environments where workloads can frequently change, and efficient traffic management is crucial for both security and performance. L4 firewalls can handle high-throughput network traffic effectively, which is essential for the dynamic scalability that cloud environments provide.

In contrast, Layer 3 (L3) firewalls are more concerned with IP addressing and routing, while Layer 7 (L7) firewalls operate at the application layer, analyzing the complete data packet contents for deeper inspection. Hardware firewalls, while effective, are typically physical appliances that may not be the primary offering within cloud-native platforms, which optimize for virtual or managed services instead. Hence, L4 firewalls are the most relevant and widely offered solutions in the context of cloud-native platforms.