Beyond Cloudflare: Securing Uptime with Diverse WAF Alternatives
Maintaining high availability for web services is paramount, and the discussion around Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) highlights a critical challenge: ensuring robust protection without inadvertently creating a single point of failure (SPOF). While services like Cloudflare WAF offer powerful features, recent outages have spurred a re-evaluation of dependency on any single provider, particularly for applications requiring 3 9s availability or higher.
The Single Point of Failure Dilemma
The fundamental tension lies in the very nature of a WAF's strength: its ability to rapidly deploy defenses against zero-day exploits across 100% of endpoints. This centralized control, whether managed by a large corporation or a distributed system, inherently presents a SPOF. While some acknowledge this trade-off, others emphasize that being down due to a widespread incident affecting a major provider can be an "easier sell" internally than an outage caused by self-managed errors.
Exploring Managed WAF and CDN Alternatives
Many organizations are looking towards established cloud providers and dedicated security/CDN services to diversify their WAF strategy:
- Cloud-Native Solutions: Leveraging existing cloud infrastructure can be a natural fit. AWS offers AWS WAF with basic DDoS protections via Route53, though cost can be a factor. Cloudfront Functions also provide a flexible way to implement custom filtering rules at the edge. Google's offering, Google Cloud Armor combined with their Load Balancer, is another robust option, even capable of balancing traffic to external networks or other clouds.
- Dedicated Providers: Several established players were mentioned as strong contenders:
- Fastly: Highlighted as an excellent option, particularly for US-based operations.
- BunnyCDN: Also noted as an excellent choice, with a strong presence in the EU.
- Akamai: A long-standing leader in web performance and security.
- Imperva: Another prominent name in the WAF and application security space.
It's important to consider that while these providers offer diversification, even smaller competitors like BunnyCDN may face similar incident challenges as they scale and grow.
Self-Hosted and Open-Source WAF Solutions
For those preferring greater control, potentially lower recurring costs, or a more specialized deployment, self-hosted and open-source WAFs present compelling choices:
- open-appsec by Checkpoint: This solution allows for proxy/gateway integration alongside a favorite firewall daemon, providing a robust self-managed WAF. Its documentation offers clear guidance for Linux installations.
- appsec by CrowdSec: Similar to open-appsec, CrowdSec's appsec component integrates with proxy/gateway setups and firewall daemons, leveraging its collaborative threat intelligence network.
- SafeLine: Recommended as a self-hosted option that is easy to set up.
- Nginx/OpenResty-based: The concept of building an open-source WAF using Nginx or OpenResty was raised, indicating a demand for highly customizable, modular solutions.