AWS Lambda and Cloud WAF upgrades for wider deployment | Fastly

Web application firewalls (WAFs) are a crucial part of the application layer for protection against attacks. Many organizations look outwardly for a WAF solution that can scale and continue to secure their applications as their traffic and business needs grow, regardless of where their applications are deployed. For example, a new application at the edge must have the same security controls as a legacy application at the core, or one hosted in the cloud. 

Unique to the Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences), enterprises can choose from the most flexible menu of deployment options – across any cloud, any container, any PaaS and any IaaS, at the core or the edge – all managed from a central console. This lets you apply consistent security controls to any web application, greatly simplifying the management of all your enterprise apps. 

“Signal Sciences [Fastly Next-Gen WAF] provides several installation options, allowing us the flexibility to install where it makes the most sense for our platforms." - Eventbrite

Today, we’re excited to share some of our recent innovations that further enhance the ability to deploy the Fastly Next-Gen WAF in more places, more quickly. 

Introducing the AWS Lambda agent for the Fastly Next-Gen WAF

Serverless is becoming increasingly popular among application-driven organizations, eliminating the need to provision and manage infrastructure and returning valuable time and resources to developers and operations teams.

According to research from Datadog, over half of organizations using the main cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) have adopted serverless. As functions move to the cloud, customers can realize a simpler, more cost-effective way to build their applications. However, applications built on or leveraging serverless environments need protection from the same bad actors and threats that come after all applications. 

We are pleased to support serverless and FaaS initiatives by announcing our integration with AWS Lambda, one of the most popular serverless solutions on the market. This integration allows for the Fastly Next-Gen WAF agent to be invoked within a Lambda function itself to minimize the impact to performance and latency. 

Our agent can be made into a Lambda layer allowing for easy integration into all of your functions. And with our Service Ready designation from AWS, the Fastly Next-Gen WAF has gone through full technical evaluations with the AWS team and will be tightly integrated into the AWS marketplace.

Review our AWS Lambda install guide to see how this deployment is done. 

Introducing enhanced multi-origin workspace deployment and management in the cloud

For larger customers with many applications and multiple origins, we are excited to announce new functionality that greatly simplifies WAF management. Our Cloud WAF deployment option now supports enhanced management of multiple origins and workspaces within one Cloud WAF instance, streamlining management of large deployments. 

Cloud WAF is one of the fastest ways to deploy our powerful, scalable WAF as it’s hosted by us and enabled with a simple DNS change, enabling you to rapidly protect your applications with minimal deployment effort. With Cloud WAF, you can be up and running in about an hour and can easily tune your security to match your needs. The product also integrates with DevOps and security toolchains to give your teams visibility into the threats targeting their applications. 

Learn more about our Cloud WAF deployment option and how you can quickly and easily protect web applications, APIs, microservices, and serverless applications—all without installing software within your infrastructure.

Don’t let limited deployment options slow you down

We know that deployment flexibility is critical to keep up with the pace of business, and that’s why we continue to innovate on the widest range of WAF deployment methods in the market. For current Next-Gen WAF customers, please contact your account manager to take advantage of these new options. If you’re not yet a Next-Gen WAF customer, reach out and we will be happy to show you how our Next-Gen WAF can fit in your environment.