Squid Forward Proxy - Hardened, Tuned, CloudWatch & SSM Ready

Deploy a production-ready Squid proxy server on hardened AWS in minutes. Built for infrastructure and security teams who need to control, filter and log outbound web traffic from AWS workloads without spending days on installation, ACL configuration and OS hardening. Every image ships pre-patched, firewall-ready and validated.

Why teams deploy this image

Locked-down environments need controlled egress. Whether you are meeting compliance requirements that mandate outbound traffic inspection, reducing bandwidth costs through caching, or giving isolated subnets a single audited path to the internet, Squid remains the industry-standard forward proxy and this image removes the setup burden.

What you get out of the box

• Latest stable Squid release, installed and enabled on first boot
• CIS-aligned OS hardening applied to the underlying Operating System base
• Access logging pre-configured in a format ready for Sentinel or any SIEM ingestion
• Support for authentication helpers (basic, LDAP, Kerberos) enable per your directory environment

Common use cases

• Egress control: give private subnets a single, policy-enforced internet path
• Compliance logging: full audit trail of outbound web requests for regulated workloads
• Bandwidth optimisation: cache repeated downloads (OS packages, container layers, updates) across a fleet
• Web filtering: allow-list or block destinations by domain, category or time-of-day ACLs
• Development environments: reproduce corporate proxy conditions for realistic testing

Who this is for

Cloud engineers, security teams, managed service providers and system administrators running AWS workloads that require governed outbound access from single VM deployments to proxy tiers behind an AWS Load Balancer.

Usage notes

• Attach an IAM instance role with the AWS-managed policies CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy and AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore to activate CloudWatch and Session Manager. No AWS credentials are stored on the image.
• Main configuration: /etc/squid/squid.conf (restrict the allowed client networks before opening the proxy port). Logs: /var/log/squid/access.log and /var/log/squid/cache.log.
• Ports: 22/tcp (SSH), 3128/tcp (proxy).
• CloudWatch agent config: /opt/aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent/etc/amazon-cloudwatch-agent.d/squid.json

Quick Start:

• Point clients at http://:3128 (default proxy port).
• SSH in as 'ubuntu'; configuration lives in /etc/squid/squid.conf - restrict the allowed client networks before opening the port.
• Logs: /var/log/squid/access.log.
• Monitoring: attach an IAM instance role with the AWS-managed policies CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy and AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore to enable CloudWatch logs/metrics (namespace CloudSOE/squid) and Session Manager. No AWS credentials are stored on the image.

Squid is developed by the Squid Software Foundation and community (squid-cache.org) and distributed under the GNU GPL v2. This offer packages, hardens and maintains Squid for AWS; it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Squid project. Ubuntu is a trademark of Canonical Ltd.