At the time of writing, the AWS WAF and AWS Shield services have the same service home page, as we saw in the How to do it... section. We saw AWS WAF in detail in this recipe. We will quickly go through some important concepts related to AWS Shield in this section.

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations to minimize application downtime and latency without engaging AWS Support to benefit from DDoS protection.

There are two tiers of AWS Shield: Standard and Advanced. Shield Standard defends against known infrastructure attacks in the network (layer 3) and transport layer (layer 4) that target our website or applications and is most effective when used with Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. AWS Shield Advanced provides higher levels of protection against attacks targeting our applications running on EC2, ELB, CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, and Route 53 resources.