AWS WAF vs Firewall Manager vs Shield vs Shield Advanced 4 Major Different Use Cases

In this article, I will give a brief overview of AWS Security services and their comprehensive usage as per scenarios.

If interested in direct differences, go to end of the article.

AWS Shield is like a team of regular bodyguards that keep your applications safe from everyday threats. It is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations to protect against the most sophisticated DDoS attacks and offers additional protection options that you can customize to your specific requirements.

AWS Shield Advanced is like a team of superhero bodyguards that protect your applications from evil DDoS attacks.

AWS Shield Advanced is a more comprehensive version of the AWS Shield service that provides enhanced DDoS protection for your applications running on AWS. It includes all the features of AWS Shield Standard, but with additional features and capabilities to help protect against larger and more complex DDoS attacks.

Some of the key features of AWS Shield Advanced include:

• Advanced DDoS protection: AWS Shield Advanced provides automatic inline mitigations to protect against the most sophisticated DDoS attacks and offers additional protection options that you can customize to your specific requirements.
• 24/7 DDoS response team: AWS Shield Advanced includes access to a team of DDoS response experts who are available 24/7 to help you respond to and mitigate DDoS attacks.
• Real-time visibility and reporting: AWS Shield Advanced provides real-time visibility into the health of your applications and the status of ongoing DDoS attacks, as well as detailed reports on the types of attacks that you have experienced.
• Customizable protection: AWS Shield Advanced allows you to customize the level of protection that you need for your applications, including the ability to set custom thresholds for traffic and attack types.

AWS WAF is like a bouncer at a trendy nightclub, only letting in the cool and well-behaved traffic and keeping out the troublemakers. It is a web application security service that helps protect web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. With AWS WAF, you can create rules that allow or block requests based on the rules that you define. You can use AWS WAF to protect your web applications from attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and other common web vulnerabilities.

AWS Firewall Manager is like the ultimate event planner, organizing and coordinating all the security measures for a smooth and protected event. It is a security management service that makes it easier to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and applications in AWS. With AWS Firewall Manager, you can set policies that define the rules that you want to enforce across your accounts, and AWS Firewall Manager automatically deploys those rules to the appropriate resources. This helps you to ensure consistent protection across your accounts and applications and makes it easier to manage firewall rules at scale.For example if you want to make WAF changes applied to all region,then Firewall manager will handle it for you.

Now the Question comes which one to use when.

The below Table can help you understand.

It’s worth noting that these services can also be used together to provide a comprehensive security solution for your applications. For example, you might use AWS Shield to protect against DDoS attacks, AWS WAF to protect against web vulnerabilities, and AWS Firewall Manager to manage firewall rules across your accounts and applications.