Ask HN: Cloudflare WAF Alternatives?

28•rco8786•2mo 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•2mo ago

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

synack•2mo 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•2mo ago

AWS WAF has some presets you can use

mappu•2mo 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•2mo 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•2mo ago

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

882542F3884314B•2mo ago

Akamai is a decent alternative.

BOOSTERHIDROGEN•2mo ago

CrowdSec

3rube•2mo ago

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

stevefan1999•2mo ago

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

server_man3000•2mo 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

mindcrash•2mo ago

some alternatives which can be self hosted:

open-appsec (by checkpoint), their proxy/gateway integration and your favorite firewall daemon:

https://docs.openappsec.io/getting-started/start-with-linux

appsec (by crowdsec), their proxy/gateway integration and your favorite firewall daemon:

https://docs.crowdsec.net/u/getting_started/installation/lin...

tguvot•2mo ago

imperva

dennis16384•2mo ago

Google Cloud Armor plus Load Balancer?

You can balance traffic to external networks or clouds with it too.

Carriethebest•2mo ago

I would recommend SafeLine. It's self-hosted and easy to setup

cport1•1mo ago

I have been using https://webdecoy.com and integrating it with Cloudflare WAF.

A Tale of Two Standards, POSIX and Win32 (2005)

Ask HN: Is the Downfall of SaaS Started?

Flirt: The Native Backend

OpenAI's Latest Platform Targets Enterprise Customers

Goldman Sachs taps Anthropic's Claude to automate accounting, compliance roles

Ai.com bought by Crypto.com founder for $70M in biggest-ever website name deal

Big Tech's AI Push Is Costing More Than the Moon Landing

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future [video]

Ask HN: How are researchers using AlphaFold in 2026?

Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler

Watermark API – $0.01/image, 10x cheaper than Cloudinary

Now send your marketing campaigns directly from ChatGPT

Queueing Theory v2: DORA metrics, queue-of-queues, chi-alpha-beta-sigma notation

Show HN: Hibana – choreography-first protocol safety for Rust

Haniri: A live autonomous world where AI agents survive or collapse

GPT-5.3-Codex System Card [pdf]

Atlas: Manage your database schema as code

Geist Pixel

Show HN: MCP to get latest dependency package and tool versions

The better you get at something, the harder it becomes to do

Show HN: WP Float – Archive WordPress blogs to free static hosting

Show HN: I Hacked My Family's Meal Planning with an App

Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal

The Future of Systems

NASA now allowing astronauts to bring their smartphones on space missions

Claude Code Is the Inflection Point

Show HN: MicroClaw – Agentic AI Assistant for Telegram, Built in Rust

Show HN: Omni-BLAS – 4x faster matrix multiplication via Monte Carlo sampling

The AI-Ready Software Developer: Conclusion – Same Game, Different Dice