Amazon API Gateway vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Experienced a lack of available programming languages while working on a minor project. I had to halt the project and wait for it to be added later. It took ages and had a hit on our productivity. It has a centralized management system which helps and an easy interface which helps to manage multiple tasks in case of large-scale operations and projects.

Incentivized

Imperva web application firewall does a great job in giving us control over access to our public web servers. With our regular hosting provider, we couldn't block access based on geography, or really anything. So we had to rely on traditional access controls to protect the data. But with the WAF, we can block countries such as North Korea, or we could stop any SQL Injection attempts, or even do a temporary block of IP in the case of detected brute-forcing.

• API Gateway integrates well with AWS Lambda. This allows us to build a web server in the language and framework of our choice, deploy it as a Lambda function, and expose it through API Gateway.
• API Gateway manages API keys. Building rate limiting and request quota features are not trivial (or interesting).
• API Gateway's pricing can be very attractive for services that are accessed infrequently.

Incentivized

• Alert Aggregation - Correlates different violations into perceived correlated attacks.
• Ease of deployment - as one of the only WAFs that allow bridge mode deployment, this can be deployed with without downtime and no Network Architecture modifications. If the need for proxy is required at a later time, Transparent Reverse Proxy can be deployed within seconds and minimal configuration.
• Custom Policies - Custom security policies are easy to configure.
• Reporting - There are a good amount of pre-configured reports available by default.

Incentivized

• Client certificates are troublesome when trying to attach them to API GW stages.
• Debugging across several services can be difficult when API GW is integrated with Route 53 and another service like Lambda or EC2/ELB.
• Creating internal/private APIs, particularly with custom domains, can be unintuitive.

Incentivized

• The UI can use a little work (but is largely decent)

It is a great product very reliable and stable for connecting various aws services like we connected with lambda function and it is working very well, never faced any issue after the setup. It also saves out lots of money as well as time after we implemented the automatic ec2 server recovery system

Incentivized

There are just a couple of points that are hard to find, that probably could be elsewhere. But these are minor; everything else is right where you'd expect it to be.

We always had a great experience with the AWS support team. They were always on time and very dependable. It was a good partnership while we worked to resolve our issues.

Incentivized

We haven't needed support from Imperva since implementation. But during that time, their personnel were very quick to respond to questions. Since then, it's been largely doing its thing for us (which is exactly what we'd hoped).

When we tested Azure API Management at the time, it had serious connectivity issues, it was very unstable, and it needed to do a lot using the command line. Comparing with the AWS solution, which was more mature, and the fact that we have services in use on AWS, we ended up choosing to continue using AWS products. This so as not to run the risk of increasing latency in accesses, and of some functionality not working, due to being developed yet.

Incentivized

Ultimately, it was the easiest to work with that was still a "known" company (we've been burned too many times by up-and-comers). We needed something that gave us a lot of control but then didn't need its handheld on a daily basis. Imperva gives us a lot of that and we are still able to navigate it with ease.

• ROI is negative, you need either to hire them to work with you or spend days/weeks to figure out issues.
• For some of the projects in the end it is not worth it, it is just a "buzz" to use serverless but not practical.
• Service is easy to set up authorization and it is easy to manage.

Incentivized

• Meet compliance requirements - Check.
• Better Insight into web application - Absolutely great, checks all the traffic against RFC standards and will alert on common development mistakes that duplicate application traffic or provide attack vectors for potential attackers.
• Have had several issues blocking a customer without producing alerts, while it happened only one week out of 2 years of working with the devices, it did produce a lot of headaches.

Incentivized