DDoS Protection with AWS Shield - Choosing Between Standard and Advanced
Understand the differences between Standard's free L3/L4 protection and Advanced's L7 support with SRT assistance. Learn about cost protection and proactive engagement.
Overview of Shield
Shield is a managed protection service that defends applications against DDoS attacks. Shield Standard is automatically enabled at no cost for all AWS accounts and automatically mitigates L3/L4 attacks such as SYN floods, UDP reflection, and DNS query floods. Shield Advanced provides L7 attack response and additional features for $3,000 per month.
Advanced Features
Shield Advanced registers CloudFront, ALB, Route 53, Global Accelerator, and Elastic IP as protected resources, detecting and mitigating L7 HTTP flood attacks. The SRT (Shield Response Team) provides 24/7 support for DDoS attack analysis and mitigation, including creating WAF rules on your behalf. Cost protection is a feature where AWS reimburses scaling costs incurred on CloudFront, ALB, Route 53, and EC2 due to DDoS-driven traffic increases, preventing unexpected cost spikes from attacks.
Operating Shield Advanced
Enabling proactive engagement in Shield Advanced causes the SRT (Shield Response Team) to automatically begin response when a DDoS attack is detected. Associating Route 53 health checks with Shield Advanced protected resources improves detection accuracy based on application health. Shield Advanced's cost protection reimburses the increased scaling costs (EC2 Auto Scaling, CloudFront data transfer) caused by DDoS attacks. The attack visualization dashboard lets you monitor attack type, scale, duration, and mitigation status in real time. You can systematically learn Shield from basics to advanced topics through books (Amazon).
Shield Pricing
Shield Standard is automatically enabled at no cost for all AWS accounts. Shield Advanced has a fixed monthly fee of $3,000 plus additional charges based on data transfer volume for protected resources. A 1-year commitment is required. When Shield Advanced is enabled through Organizations, the $3,000 monthly fee is charged only once for the entire organization, with member accounts paying only for data transfer on protected resources. The decision to adopt Shield Advanced should be based on comparing DDoS attack risk against the value of cost protection.
Summary
Shield is a service that automatically mitigates L3/L4 DDoS attacks for free with Standard, while Advanced provides L7 attack response and SRT support. Advanced's proactive engagement triggers automatic SRT response upon attack detection, and cost protection reimburses scaling cost increases caused by DDoS attacks. With Organizations, the $3,000 monthly fee is shared across the entire organization.