Introduction to AWS Shield Service

AWS Shield is a managed DDoS protection service that can detect and automatically minimize threats that might cause one’s application to go down.

AWS Shield is a security service that guards against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on web applications hosted on Amazon Web Services’ public cloud. It is available in two tiers: AWS Shield Standard and AWS Shield Advanced. AWS Shield Advanced provides significantly more power and protection than the Standard version.

Shield detects and defends against three types of DDoS attacks: infrastructure-layer, state-exhaustion, and application-layer. On the other hand, Shield Advanced is paid service. This provides additional DDoS mitigation capability, intelligent attack detection, and mitigation against attacks at the application and network layers.

In this blog, we will be discussing AWS Shield in detail. Before proceeding further let’s go through the topics that we will be covering in this blog:

1. Service tiers of AWS Shield
2. Features of AWS Shield
3. Pricing of AWS shield
4. Difference between AWS WAF and AWS Shield
5. Working of AWS Shield
6. Benefits of AWS Shield

Service tiers of AWS Shield

An institution gets to choose between two Shield service tiers: Standard and Advanced. Shield Standard is a free option that protects against some of the most common types of DDoS attacks. 

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On the other hand, Shield Advanced is a paid service that supplements the Standard tier features and provides protection against even the most advanced and powerful DDoS attacks.

Shield Standard: It is free and provides DDoS protection against several networks and transport layer DDoS attacks. This safeguard is activated automatically.

Shield Standard: It is a paid service that offers additional DDoS mitigation capability, intelligent attack detection, and attack mitigation at the application and network layers.

Features of AWS Shield

There are many features of Shield. Some of those are:

1. Tailored detection: Shield Advanced detects threats to your protected CloudFront, Global Accelerator, and other services based on traffic patterns.
2. Health-based detection: Shield detects attacks that harm the health of your application. It is completed more quickly and at lower traffic levels. As a result, your application’s DDoS resilience improves and prevents false-positive notifications.
3. Attack notification: Whenever a DDOS attack occurs, AWS Shield Advanced gives you near real-time notification through Amazon CloudWatch. It offers detailed diagnostics and the ability to view a summary of previous attacks from the dashboard.
4. Global availability: AWS Shield Advanced is widely accessible. By implementing CloudFront in front of your application, you can protect web applications hosted everywhere in the world.
5. Inline attack mitigation: AWS Shield Standard includes automated mitigation techniques that protect underlying AWS services from commonly occurring infrastructure attacks.

Pricing of Shield

AWS Shield Standard protects all AWS customers from the most common network and transport layer DDoS threats to your application or website at no additional cost. AWS Shield Advanced is a paid service that enhances the security of web applications running on EC2, ELB, and other AWS services.

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Shield Advanced has a one-year subscription commitment and a monthly fee. The monthly payment is around $3,000.00. It also includes a usage fee for data transfers from Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, ELB, and EC2.

Let’s look at the data transfer cost of Shield Advanced for CloudFront, EC2, and NLB in detail:

Data	CloudFront	EC2 and NLB
First 100 TB	$0.025	$0.05
Next 400 TB	$0.02	$0.04
Next 500 TB	$0.015	$0.03
Next 4 PB	$0.01	Need to contact the respective team for the cost

Difference between AWS WAF and Shield

WAF and Shield are a part of the AWS Edge Services ecosystem. Both services provide DDoS protection. The distinction is that WAF protects the application layer, whereas Shield protects the infrastructure layers of the OSI model.

Let’s see the difference between these two services in a tabular format:

Benchmark	WAF	Shield
Safeguard against	HTTP and DNS Floods, SQL injection, and Remote file inclusion	Volumetric and state-exhaustion attacks
What is protected?	Layer 3 and 4 (Network and Transport layers)	Web applications

Working of Shield

A distributed denial of service attack tries to make an online service unavailable by flooding it with malicious traffic. This is where Shield comes into the picture. Shield Standard provides automatic protections to all AWS customers who use services such as Amazon CloudFront at no additional cost.

The Shield is compatible with most AWS products, including ELB, Amazon Cloud Front, and Amazon Route 53. Amazon also claims to safeguard its customer base from DDoS network attacks.

As a protective measure against such attacks, AWS’s infrastructure is built to be DDoS-resistant that can automatically identify and filter excess traffic 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Furthermore, for added security, Shield provides a distributed web application firewall along with it.

Benefits of Shield

There are various benefits of Shield. Some of those are:

1. Cost-efficient: With Shield Standard, you naturally get network layer safety against some of the most prevalent DDoS attacks as an AWS customer. This safeguarding does not involve extra costs, resources, or time to implement.
2. Traffic monitoring: Shield Standard inspects incoming network traffic and detects malicious traffic using a combination of traffic signatures and other analysis techniques.
3. Global threat dashboard: You can see basic information regarding DDoS attacks on the Amazon Web Services network. This information is available in the AWS Management Console’s global threat dashboard. Using the console, the user can get information about the total number of attacks, threat level, most common vector, etc.
4. Easy to use: Shield is a simple service that allows you to quickly and easily protect your applications. There are no routing changes required to enable these safeguards.
5. DDoS mitigation: Shield Standard automatically mitigates over 99 percent of infrastructure layer threats identified in much less than a second.
6. 24×7 access to our DDoS Response Team (DRT): This should be self-explanatory. DRT is available to you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You would need the Organization or Business Support levels to contact the DRT.
7. Real-time metrics and reports: You can always see the present status of your DDoS protection, as well as you can also see an instantaneous report with attack diagnostics and AWS CloudWatch metrics.

Conclusion

In today’s article, we ended up going over the AWS Shield in greater depth. Through writing this article, I hope that I must have been able to alleviate some of your worries. 

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