US Patent 11115382 Global objects for federated firewall rule management

A method of defining distributed firewall rules in a group of datacenters is provided. Each datacenter includes a group of data compute nodes (DCNs). The method sends a set of security tags from a particular datacenter to other datacenters. The method, at each datacenter, associates a unique identifier of one or more DCNs of the datacenter to each security tag. The method associates one or more security tags to each of a set of security group at the particular datacenter and defines a set of distributed firewall rules at the particular datacenter based on the security tags. The method sends the set of distributed firewall rules from the particular datacenter to other datacenters. The method, at each datacenter, translates the firewall rules by mapping the unique identifier of each DCN in a distributed firewall rule to a corresponding static address associated with the DCN.