INTELLIGENT DEPLOYMENT REGION SELECTION AND SCALING OF CLOUD-BASED FIREWALLS

Automated, intelligent selection of regions for cloud-based firewall deployment and scaling of firewalls down to as few as zero in a cloud region is described herein. The service collects and evaluates Usage metrics pertaining to firewalls deployed in each region are collected and evaluated to determine whether to scale firewalls in a region up or down. Scaling down of firewalls to zero is conditioned on at least one other region having a firewall(s) available for traffic inspection such that the number of total firewalls available for inspection of network traffic is at least one at any given time. When scaling up through deployment of additional firewalls, if endpoint devices located near a region in which a firewall is not available contribute substantially to firewall usage in another region, the region nearest to those endpoint devices is determined and selected for deployment of the additional firewalls.