Ask HN: Cloudflare WAF Alternatives?

23•rco8786•15h ago

I don't know if we're ready to pull the trigger yet, but curious if other folks are looking at alternatives.

The WAF is great, but recent events have made it obvious that having a single point of failure entirely defeats the purpose of DNS being a distributed/decentralized service.

Is anyone doing anything creative here? We like the features that the WAF provides - but not at the expense of global outages. If you have a 3 9s availability SLA, you've just blown 90% of your allotted downtime because of Cloudflare's WAF.

Comments

yearolinuxdsktp•15h ago

AWS Route53, built-in DDoS basic protections, plus AWS WAF (can be expensive depending on your budget).

synack•12h ago

I've been using Cloudfront Functions to do some of the filtering that a WAF would do. It's quite flexible, but you've gotta figure out your own rules.

y-curious•11h ago

AWS WAF has some presets you can use

mappu•14h ago

The ability of a WAF to respond to an 0day incident is rapid rollout, 100% of endpoints, which is a SPOF no matter whether it's done via a big company or by a distributed system.

poguemahoney•44m ago

Assuming there are still 2 WAF makers they hopefully do two mostly independent rollouts at least with separate reviewers.. It is a little shocking to me how far we have slid down the slope to letting one monopoly decide when each part of of computing environment is up.. But if bigger organizations are down it is socially acceptable to have an outage.

grim_io•13h ago

Being down because half the internet is down is an easier sell than being down because you fucked it up yourself.

882542F3884314B•12h ago

Akamai is a decent alternative.

BOOSTERHIDROGEN•11h ago

CrowdSec

3rube•9h ago

Fastly (US) and BunnyCDN (EU) are excellent options

stevefan1999•8h ago

What about open source alternative built with Nginx/OpenResty? I forgot the name but that's the spirit

server_man3000•4h ago

Not worth. Competitors like Bunny CDN which is much smaller will inevitably have a much worse incident as they grow. Every large company will inevitably have a couple bad incidents so asking “what other large company will never have incidents” is a moronic perspective IMO

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