Just wanted to add @bj to this thread that I think a $100-ish Cloud Router from Mikrotik would blow most hardware away, including Ubiquiti, on pure performance. With the $50 and under models you are still getting 1 million PPS. The new cloud router series really has a crazy amount of power.

This still coming from a pure PPS (packets per second) point of view.

I think the cheapest cloud router has 12 to 16 cores That would only count for the core routers I am more familiar with (12 to 24 now) in the $500 range.

Very poor marketing in the states but very popular with western country WISPS.

I've wondered this myself, but more generically than just Ciscos and ASAs.

I did this with Barracudas when I demo'ed them a few years ago. The Barracuda each had their own self signed cert, and you imported their public key portion into the remote side for authentication.

I'm not sure how it would work if both sides are using the same wildcard cert - I would think you would loose a large part of the security.