HACKER Q&A
📣 rco8786

Cloudflare WAF Alternatives?


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.


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

👤 mappu
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.

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

👤 882542F3884314B
Akamai is a decent alternative.

👤 BOOSTERHIDROGEN
CrowdSec

👤 3rube
Fastly (US) and BunnyCDN (EU) are excellent options

👤 stevefan1999
What about open source alternative built with Nginx/OpenResty? I forgot the name but that's the spirit

👤 server_man3000
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