Networking

East-West vs North-South Traffic Flow

Network Design diagram · made in Skemio

Network diagram showing Internet traffic passing through an edge firewall to a core switch, which branches into east-west traffic across app and database servers.
Network diagram showing Internet traffic passing through an edge firewall to a core switch, which branches into east-west traffic across app and database servers.
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What it shows

  • North-South handles client ingress/egress across the network edge.
  • East-West dominates internal microservice and database replication flows.
  • Perimeter firewalls miss lateral movement; distributed firewalls stop it.

The takeaway

Perimeter firewalls protect the perimeter, but distributed firewalls protect against lateral attacks.

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