Licensing a cloud firewall
Firewalls deployed in a datacenter typically get booted up and will run for years, but in a cloud setting a firewall may serve only a very temporary purpose; resources, like additional webservers, may only be spun up during certain times of the day to handle additional capacity, and then get spun down as the load diminishes. So can cloud firewalls be spun up to provide more capacity and get shut down once the need dies down. Typical licensing is charged on a yearly basis and doesn’t consider how many hours or processing cycles are consumed by the firewall. A special licensing model called Pay-as-You-Go (or PayGo) is available that charges per hour of usage rather than a flat fee for a full year. A few additional factors come into play that determine the exact price per hour, like the size (the number of CPU cores and amount of memory) and the subscription features activated in the bundle. Typically, there’s a small bundle that only includes...