AWS Shield

A managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS.

Shield Tiers and Features

Standard
- All AWS customers benefit from the automatic protections of Shield Standard.
- Shield Standard provides always-on network flow monitoring which inspects incoming traffic to AWS and detect malicious traffic in real-time.
- Uses several techniques like deterministic packet filtering, and priority based traffic shaping to automatically mitigate attacks without impact to your applications.
- When you use Shield Standard with CloudFront and Route 53, you receive comprehensive availability protection against all known infrastructure attacks.
Advanced
- Shield Advanced provides enhanced detection, inspecting network flows and also monitoring application layer traffic to your Elastic IP address, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, or Route 53 resources.
- It handle the majority of DDoS protection and mitigation responsibilities for layer 3, layer 4, and layer 7 attacks.
- You have 24×7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team. To contact the DDoS Response Team, customers will need the Enterprise or Business Support levels of AWS Premium Support.
- It automatically provides additional mitigation capacity to protect against larger DDoS attacks. The DDoS Response Team also applies manual mitigations for more complex and sophisticated DDoS attacks.
- It gives you complete visibility into DDoS attacks with near real-time notification via CloudWatch and detailed diagnostics on the “AWS WAF and AWS Shield” Management Console.
- Shield Advanced comes with “DDoS cost protection”, a safeguard from scaling charges as a result of a DDoS attack that cause usage spikes on your AWS services. It does so by providing service credits for charges due to usage spikes.
- It is available globally on all CloudFront and Route 53 edge locations. You can also enable Shield Advanced directly on an Elastic IP or ELB in the following AWS Regions – Northern Virginia, Oregon, Ireland, Tokyo, and Northern California.
- With Shield Advanced you will be able to see the history of all incidents in the trailing 13 months.

Pricing

Shield Standard provides protection at no additional charge.
Shield Advanced, however, is a paid service. It requires a 1-year subscription commitment and charges a monthly fee, plus a usage fee based on data transfer out from CloudFront, ELB, EC2, and AWS Global Accelerator.

Limits

You can monitor and protect up to 100 Elastic IP addresses, CloudFront distributions, Route 53 hosted zones, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers or Global Accelerator accelerators each per account with Shield Advanced.

Sources:
https://aws.amazon.com/shield/features/
https://aws.amazon.com/shield/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/shield/faqs/

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