The official AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) definition by AWS:

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.

In other words, setting up a WAF would not only help you monitor and track the requests reaching your AWS resources, but could let you block or allow them to pass based on a set of rules you specify. That would lead to cleaner server application logs, common attacks mitigation, less traffic on the server instances and most importantly, cost cutting.

In this article, I will show you how we used AWS WAF at Interactive Life on an application that was already in production. We had discovered a bug on the frontend that was draining our EC2 instances. After research, a WAF seemed to be the most reasonable approach to implement as we needed a quick yet efficient solution that’s also cost effective. …