CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesamazon-ec2amazon-waf
qwerty
qwerty

Reputation: 165

Use a Web Application Firewall (WAF) with an EC2 instance

I have a web app running on my Amazon EC2 instance. How can I integrate a Web Application Firewall with my EC2?

I have tried setting up the WAF, but it can only be associated with either a CloudFront distribution or an Elastic Load Balancer. Do I need to setup a CloudFront distribution and point it at my EC2 instance?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 11398

Answers (4)

qwerty
qwerty

Reputation: 165

I ended up setting up an elastic load balancer pointing to my single instance and then adding the web application firewall pointing to the load balancer. It works pretty well and doesn't cost too much more per month from AWS.

Upvotes: 6

Ashan
Ashan

Reputation: 19728

The two approaches you can connect AWS WAF to your EC2 instance through,

  • AWS CloudFront
  • Application Load Balancer (ALB)

Each approach has its own pros and cons. If your application servers more of content that can be cached, then having AWS CloudFront along with WAF. If your application cluster needs to scale but most of it is dynamic content then going for ALB is more reasonable.

Note: There is an added fixed cost for ALB (In addition to the variable cost which is not significant though) for each month while CloudFront cost is variable and consumption driven.

It is also possible to have both CloudFront and ALB together where you can add the WAF to CloudFront only.

Upvotes: 4

joseph
joseph

Reputation: 23

You need to set up at least Application layer Loadbalancer to use AWS WAF.

side note: AWS WAF has a lot of restriction. For request count based blocking you will end up having LAMBDA scripts to COUNT and update the AWS WAF ruleset. Also, they don't provide WAF logs as of my Knowledge. Try looking at cloud WAF solutions like SOPHOS.

Upvotes: 0

eckes
eckes

Reputation: 10423

This is how you use AWS WAF, it only works in these two scenarios. For an EC2 application it is best to configure an ALB in front of it (even if you have only one instance).

BTW: You might get away with only using the Application Loadbalancer (ALB) from AWS, this is doing more content validity checks than classic AWS ELB is doing.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions