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 handles 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. 
  • 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.

Note: If you are studying for the AWS Certified Security Specialty exam, we highly recommend that you take our AWS Certified Security – Specialty Practice Exams and read our Security Specialty exam study guide.

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