Random one here. I love LUCI and the FW page to control the iptables under the hood.
Is there a mechanism to extract and use Luci/FW3/iptables on a general Linux distro (ubuntu/centos) etc as the Luci Firewall App is by far the best WebUI I have found for simplifying iptables rules.
I would like to try build components from OpenWRT on AWS EC2 - ideally, take v20 image and run it natively within AWS like I do on my GL & Pi devices.
Well, you can export the iptables rules with {iptables,ip6tables}-{save,restore}.
But to be frank, this is not worth the effort, and fw3/iptables is virtually deprecated.
Anyway, it is going to be replaced by fw4/nftables rather sooner than later.
I'm currently running a general purpose Linux as a router with firewalld.
It is based on zone model, supports IP sets and can be configured for PBR.
Also it can be easily installed from the official repos and thus properly maintained.
Although you can run OpenWrt on any VPS with KVM, it's maintenance takes too much time.
I used to run a VPS with OpenWrt for a few years, so I understand the related issues well enough.
If hardware allows, better save your time and use a general purpose distro from the start.
Many thanks for the info. It is more of the GUI aspect that I really liked - the simplicity.
I use FortiGates a lot and the GUI is good, but for some applications IPTABLES if fine, but there is not real GUI/webUI that I can find... apart from LUCI!
If you want to proceed with OpenWrt on AWS: