Ask HN: 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.

28 points | by rco8786 3 days ago

12 comments

  • mappu 3 days ago
    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.
    [-]
    • poguemahoney 2 days ago
      Assuming there are still 2 WAF makers they hopefully do two mostly independent rollouts at least with separate reviewers.. It is a little shocking to me how far we have slid down the slope to letting one monopoly decide when each part of of computing environment is up.. But if bigger organizations are down it is socially acceptable to have an outage.
  • server_man3000 3 days ago
    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
  • mindcrash 2 days ago
    some alternatives which can be self hosted:

    open-appsec (by checkpoint), their proxy/gateway integration and your favorite firewall daemon:

    https://docs.openappsec.io/getting-started/start-with-linux

    appsec (by crowdsec), their proxy/gateway integration and your favorite firewall daemon:

    https://docs.crowdsec.net/u/getting_started/installation/lin...

  • dennis16384 2 days ago
    Google Cloud Armor plus Load Balancer?

    You can balance traffic to external networks or clouds with it too.

  • stevefan1999 3 days ago
    What about open source alternative built with Nginx/OpenResty? I forgot the name but that's the spirit
  • yearolinuxdsktp 3 days ago
    AWS Route53, built-in DDoS basic protections, plus AWS WAF (can be expensive depending on your budget).
    [-]
    • synack 3 days ago
      I've been using Cloudfront Functions to do some of the filtering that a WAF would do. It's quite flexible, but you've gotta figure out your own rules.
      [-]
      • y-curious 3 days ago
        AWS WAF has some presets you can use
  • 3rube 3 days ago
    Fastly (US) and BunnyCDN (EU) are excellent options
  • grim_io 3 days ago
    Being down because half the internet is down is an easier sell than being down because you fucked it up yourself.
  • 882542F3884314B 3 days ago
    Akamai is a decent alternative.
  • BOOSTERHIDROGEN 3 days ago
    CrowdSec
  • tguvot 2 days ago
    imperva