How can you use AWS Shield to protect against DDoS attacks?

3 How to enable AWS Shield?

Enabling AWS Shield is easy and does not require any changes to your existing AWS resources or applications. To enable AWS Shield Standard, you do not need to do anything, as it is automatically applied to all your AWS resources in all regions. To enable AWS Shield Advanced, you need to subscribe to the service through the AWS Management Console or the AWS CLI and select the resources that you want to protect. You can choose to protect individual resources, such as EC2 instances, or aggregate resources, such as CloudFront distributions or ELB load balancers. You can also specify the protection groups, which are sets of resources that share the same protection settings and metrics. After you enable AWS Shield Advanced, you can view and manage your protection status, configuration, and alerts through the AWS Shield console or the AWS Shield API.

4 What are the benefits of AWS Shield?

AWS Shield can help you improve the security, availability, and performance of your AWS applications and infrastructure. It can reduce the risk of downtime and service degradation caused by DDoS attacks, eliminating the need to deploy and maintain your own DDoS protection solutions or services. Additionally, it provides visibility and insight into the DDoS attacks targeting your AWS resources, as well as flexibility and control over your DDoS protection settings and policies. Moreover, it integrates seamlessly with other AWS services and features, allowing you to enhance your overall security posture and leverage the benefits of the AWS cloud.

5 What are the limitations of AWS Shield?

AWS Shield can provide effective protection against most types of DDoS attacks, however, it is not a foolproof solution. It cannot protect against application layer attacks, such as login brute force, credential stuffing, or web scraping; these require the use of AWS WAF or other application security solutions. Additionally, AWS Shield does not protect against DDoS attacks that originate from within your own AWS account or network. You must use AWS security best practices and tools, such as IAM, VPC Flow Logs, or Amazon GuardDuty to monitor and secure your AWS account and network. Finally, it does not protect against DDoS attacks that bypass the AWS network or services. To limit the exposure of your IP addresses and restrict access to your resources, use AWS security features and techniques like security groups, network ACLs, or private subnets.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?