Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
2025-08-01T15:32:18Z
Aug 1, 2025
The CDN is for caching and The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is for protecting the servers from malicious traffic. They both perform different jobs and serve different purposes, so they complement each other. We actually tried both deployment methods, but the cloud option is easier. For the on-premises option, you need to have all sensors installed in your cluster, which was not suitable for our use case. We wanted to control everything through the cloud and then hit our servers before classifying whether the traffic is malicious or not. We wanted to have that logic offloaded to the cloud so we wouldn't have to manage it. We tried both options but decided to go with the cloud deployment.
Find out what your peers are saying about Fastly, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Akamai and others in Web Application Firewall (WAF). Updated: August 2025.
WAFs safeguard web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between a web application and the internet. A primary defense mechanism, they protect against attacks such as cross-site forgery, cross-site-scripting (XSS), and SQL injection.Designed to protect web applications from a wide range of threats, a WAF acts as a barrier, preventing unauthorized access and malicious traffic. Users find that effective WAF solutions offer a balance between security and performance without...
The CDN is for caching and The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is for protecting the servers from malicious traffic. They both perform different jobs and serve different purposes, so they complement each other. We actually tried both deployment methods, but the cloud option is easier. For the on-premises option, you need to have all sensors installed in your cluster, which was not suitable for our use case. We wanted to control everything through the cloud and then hit our servers before classifying whether the traffic is malicious or not. We wanted to have that logic offloaded to the cloud so we wouldn't have to manage it. We tried both options but decided to go with the cloud deployment.
We use it to protect all our public-hosted sites. It's a replacement for Akamai. We migrated from Akamai to Fastly.
We used Signal Sciences to implement a web application firewall for some of our applications.