Azure Firewall protects your applications and workloads with cloud-native network security that automatically scales based on your traffic needs. Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of prescaling in Azure Firewall – a new capability that gives you more control and predictability over how your firewall scales.
Why pre-scaling?
Today, Azure Firewall automatically scales in response to real-time traffic demand. For organizations with predictable traffic patterns – such as seasonal events, business campaigns, holidays, or planned migrations – the ability to plan capacity in advance can provide greater confidence and control.
That’s where prescaling comes in.
With prescaling, you can:
- Plan ahead– Set a baseline number of firewall capacity units to ensure capacity is already in place before demand rises.
- Stay flexible – Define both minimum and maximum capacity unit values, so your firewall always has room to grow while staying within your chosen bounds.
- See clearly – Monitor capacity trends with a new observed capacity metric and configure alerts to know when scaling events occur.
You can think of it as adding extra checkout counters before a holiday rush – when the customers arrive, you’re already prepared to serve them without delays or bottlenecks.
Example scenarios
- E-commerce sales events – Scale up before a holiday shopping promotion to handle the surge in online buyers.
- Workload migrations – Ensure sufficient capacity is ready during a large data or VM migration window.
- Seasonal usage – For industries like education, gaming, or media streaming, pre-scale ahead of known peak seasons.
Getting started in Azure Portal
- Navigate to your Azure Firewall resource in the Azure Portal.
- Select Scaling options in settings.
- By default, every Azure Firewall starts in autoscaling mode. To enable prescaling, simply switch to pre-scaling mode in the Azure Portal and configure your desired capacity range:
- Minimum capacity: 2 or higher.
- Maximum capacity: up to 50, depending on your needs.
- Monitor the scaling behavior with the observed capacity metric.
Billing and availability
Pre-scaling uses a new Capacity Unit Hour meter. Charges apply based on the number of firewall instances you configure.
- Standard: $0.07 per capacity unit hour
- Premium: $0.11 per capacity unit hour
✨ Next steps
Prescaling gives you predictable performance and proactive control over your firewall, helping you confidently handle the traffic patterns that matter most to your business.
🚀 Try prescaling today and share your feedback with the team.
Learn more about how to configure and monitor this feature in the Azure Firewall prescaling documentation.
Microsoft