AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) now available on Application Load Balancer (ALB)

When Amazon launched AWS WAF in October of 2015, it made many customers’ lives easier, but required that they use AWS CloudFront as their Content Delivery Network (CDN). Many customers already had other CDN partners, such as Akamai and Fastly, and couldn’t realistically switch to CloudFront to take advantage of AWS WAF. This has now changed, as just yesterday Amazon announced AWS WAF availability on the Application Load Balancer (ALB).  This opens up a lot of opportunities for AWS customers that aren’t using CloudFront.
 
Web application firewalls (WAF) filter, monitor, report and potentially block HTTP traffic to and from web servers and web applications. WAFs inspect HTTP traffic looking for malicious behavior targeting known security flaws. In addition, WAFs can define the allowed behavior of web application users by enforcing a site navigation map of whitelisted URLs. In the case of AWS WAF, this is done by defining “web ACLs” (Access Control Lists).
 
When security of your web application is important, WAFs are a great tool to protect your infrastructure, as WAFs can protect your web workloads against threats like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, session hijacking, parameter or URL tampering and buffer overflows.
 
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Brandorr Group is an Advanced Amazon Web Services Consulting Partner with decades of experience architecting, securing, automating, and managing cloud infrastructure using AWS best practices. 
 
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