Looking at firewalls through an MLOps lens: they're just another inference pipeline. Need high throughput, low latency, and zero downtime for model deployments. My team is prepping our 2026 network refresh.
Current shortlist: Check Point Quantum, Palo Alto, Fortinet. Must handle encrypted traffic inspection for 500 users without becoming a bottleneck for GPU cluster traffic (research workloads).
Need real data from similar-scale deployments:
* Actual threat prevention throughput numbers with all services enabled.
* Stability of API for automated policy changes (Infrastructure as Code).
* Overhead for managing 1000+ granular application rules.
* Real cost for 3-year subscription, not just hardware list price.
If you've done a bake-off recently, what were the hard metrics? Especially on SSL inspection performance hit.
Prove it with a benchmark.