AWS Shield is accessed from within the same dashboard as AWS WAF and again is used to protect your web application infrastructure. AWS Shield is used to protect your infrastructure from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. There are different types of DDoS attacks, but the end goal is always the same, to significantly impact the performance and ability of the targeted web servers. This strain on resources prevents any genuine web request from being processed by your infrastructure due to the effort required to process the bad requests. This performance hit can be so severe that your website or application can appear to be offline.