Uncovering AWS Shield Pricing, Features, and Benefits

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple compromised systems flood a target with traffic. This prevents legitimate end users from accessing the target services and can potentially cause the target to crash due to overwhelming traffic volume. This is why AWS Shield was introduced. 

AWS Shield is a fully managed service designed to protect your applications from DDoS attacks, ensuring the availability and reliability of your cloud resources. It integrates seamlessly with other AWS services to ensure a comprehensive security suite. 

It offers two levels of security offerings, Standard and Advanced, each providing different features and benefits. Thus, understanding the complex AWS Shield pricing structure is crucial for managing your cloud security budget effectively.

What is AWS Shield?

AWS Shield is a fully managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service designed to protect your web applications from DDoS attacks. It provides dynamic detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection. 

It automatically safeguards your resources without any additional setup or configuration, providing layers of defense to mitigate various types of attacks. AWS Shield protects a wide range of known DDoS attack vectors and zero-day attack vectors. Its detection and mitigation capabilities are designed to offer coverage against threats even if they are not explicitly known to the service at the time of detection. 

What is AWS Shield Used For?

AWS Shield is used to defend against various DDoS attacks, safeguarding your applications and minimizing downtime. Let’s explore the protection it offers at different layers:

• Layer 3 (Network Layer):
  This layer is a sub-category of infrastructure layer attack vectors. It is targeted by attacks that attempt to flood the network with large volumes of traffic, such as IP-based flood attacks. AWS Shield mitigates these volumetric attacks by absorbing and diffusing the excess traffic, ensuring that legitimate traffic reaches your applications.
  
• Layer 4 (Transport Layer):
  This layer manages end-to-end communication between hosts. It is targeted by state-exhaustion attacks that attempt to consume the connection state tables present in network devices like firewalls, load balancers, and application servers. Examples of these attacks include TCP SYN floods. AWS Shield mitigates these attacks by maintaining the state of connections and ensuring that they remain available for legitimate users.
  
• Layer 7 (Application Layer Attack):
  Application layer attacks (Layer 7) target the application itself by flooding it with valid requests, such as HTTP floods, to deny service to legitimate users. AWS Shield Advanced protects against these attacks by integrating with AWS WAF to monitor and control HTTP/HTTPS requests. 

What are the Benefits of AWS Shield?

AWS Shield provides several benefits that help protect your applications and maintain service availability. These benefits differ between the Standard and Advanced versions of AWS Shield. Here are the key benefits of AWS Shield:

Benefits of AWS Shield Standard

• Automatic Protection:
  AWS Shield Standard is automatically included at no additional cost for all AWS customers. It offers always-on detection and mitigation for common, frequently observed DDoS attacks. This provides baseline protection for your applications without any need for manual intervention.
  
• Traffic Monitoring:
  AWS Shield Standard inspects incoming traffic to your network and applies a combination of traffic signatures, anomaly algorithms, and other analysis techniques to detect malicious traffic.
  
• DDoS Mitigation:
  Over 99% of infrastructure layer attacks detected by AWS Shield Standard are automatically mitigated in less than one second.

Benefits of AWS Shield Advanced

In addition to all the benefits provided by AWS Shield Standard, AWS Shield Advanced offers enhanced protection and additional features to help protect your applications from more sophisticated threats:

• Advanced Threat Detection:
  AWS Shield Advanced offers enhanced detection and mitigation capabilities against larger and more sophisticated DDoS attacks. It provides detailed attack diagnostics and integrates with other AWS services for a comprehensive security solution.
  
• Cost Protection:
  With AWS Shield Advanced, you receive cost protection against scaling charges caused by DDoS attacks. This means that if your resources scale up due to an attack, AWS will cover the additional costs, preventing unexpected spikes in your AWS bill.
  
• 24/7 Access to DDoS Experts:
  AWS Shield Advanced provides access to the AWS Shield Response Team (SRT). These experts are available around the clock to assist you during and after DDoS attacks, offering guidance and support to help you mitigate threats effectively.
  
• Enhanced Visibility and Reporting:
  AWS Shield Advanced users benefit from detailed attack diagnostics, which are provided through AWS CloudWatch metrics and AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) integration. This detailed information helps you understand the nature of attacks and how to improve your defenses.
  
• Integration with AWS Services:
  AWS Shield integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront (a content delivery network), Amazon Route 53 (a scalable DNS and domain name registration service), and Elastic Load Balancing (a load balancer service). This integration ensures comprehensive protection across your AWS environment, enhancing the resilience of your applications.
  
• Global Threat Environment Dashboard:
  AWS Shield Advanced provides access to a global threat environment dashboard, which offers insights into the current DDoS threat landscape. This dashboard helps you stay informed about the types of attacks that are occurring worldwide, enabling you to better prepare and respond to potential threats.

How Does AWS Shield Work?

AWS Shield provides managed DDoS protection for applications running on AWS. It utilizes advanced detection and mitigation techniques to safeguard against a wide range of DDoS attacks. 

Amazon Route 53, Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), and Amazon CloudFront automatically benefit from DDoS protection through AWS Shield Standard, which is provided at no extra charge. For enhanced protection, AWS Shield Advanced can be added to specific resources, including Amazon CloudFront distributions, Amazon Route 53 hosted zones, AWS Global Accelerator, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon EC2 Elastic IP addresses. Shield Advanced focuses on the resources you specify, offering tailored protection. You can grasp more details on the options available in AWS Shield documentation. 

Here’s a closer look at how AWS Shield works:

1. Detection: AWS Shield uses a combination of static thresholds, traffic signatures, and anomaly algorithms to detect DDoS attacks. For Shield Advanced, detection is tailored based on the baseline traffic patterns of the protected resources.

2. Mitigation: Once an attack is detected, Shield applies pre-configured mitigation strategies to block malicious traffic. This includes scrubbing traffic at the network edge to ensure that only legitimate traffic reaches the target application.

3. Visibility and Reporting: AWS Shield provides continuous monitoring and reporting through CloudWatch and the AWS Shield console. Users can view real-time metrics, attack diagnostics, and historical data to understand the effectiveness of the mitigation strategies.

4. Response: For Shield Advanced customers, the SRT provides 24/7 support, applying custom mitigations as needed. This proactive engagement helps minimize the impact of sophisticated and large-scale attacks.

AWS Shield combines real-time detection, automatic mitigation, and comprehensive reporting to protect AWS resources from DDoS attacks. With the added support of the AWS Shield Response Team for Shield Advanced customers, it ensures robust defense and rapid response to emerging threats.

What is The Difference Between WAF and AWS Shield?

AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is a security service that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits like SQL injection and cross-site scripting by allowing you to configure rules that allow, block, or monitor web requests based on conditions such as IP addresses, HTTP headers, and URI strings. AWS WAF is a part of the advanced AWS Shield and is included in the AWS Edge Services ecosystem.

Both AWS WAF and AWS Shield provide DDoS protection, but they serve different purposes within the security framework. AWS WAF focuses on protecting the application layer, while AWS Shield protects the infrastructure layers of the OSI model. You will find more information about AWS Shield vs. AWS WAF in the table below:

AWS Shield Pricing: Standard vs Advanced

AWS Shield provides two tiers of protection: Standard and Advanced. Understanding the pricing for these services is crucial for managing your cloud security budget effectively.

AWS Shield Standard Pricing:

AWS Shield Standard is automatically included at no additional cost for all AWS customers. It offers always-on detection and mitigation for common DDoS attacks, primarily focusing on network and transport layer (Layers 3 and 4) attacks.

• Cost: No additional cost
• Included Protection: Automatic detection and mitigation of common DDoS attacks

AWS Shield Advanced Pricing:

AWS Shield Advanced provides enhanced protection against more sophisticated DDoS attacks. It includes 24/7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT), advanced attack diagnostics, and cost protection against scaling charges due to DDoS attacks. AWS Shield Advanced costs $3,000 per month per organization, with additional charges for data transfer out (DTO) usage fees based on the volume of data moved from protected resources like Amazon CloudFront, Amazon EC2, and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). It also demands a subscription commitment of a year. 

• Monthly Fee: $3,000 per organization 
• DTO Usage Fees: Additional charges based on data transfer out from protected resources
• Subscription Commitment: 1 Year
• Benefits: Enhanced DDoS protection, 24/7 DRT access, attack diagnostics, cost protection

You can read more about the AWS Shield pricing here. 

Final Thoughts

Adopting a proactive security strategy becomes increasingly important as your cloud infrastructure expands. AWS Shield offers a comprehensive solution for protecting against DDoS attacks, making it an essential component of your security toolkit. By leveraging both AWS Shield Standard and Advanced, you can tailor your DDoS protection to meet your organization’s specific needs.

Regularly review your security posture and stay informed about new threats to make the most of AWS Shield’s capabilities. Ensuring robust DDoS protection is a critical aspect of maintaining uninterrupted service and safeguarding your cloud resources against evolving threats.