When Rule sets aren't enough F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) brings the brains
Updated August 02, 2025

When Rule sets aren't enough F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) brings the brains

Julie Pierce | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • VoltMesh

Overall Satisfaction with F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

The big problem it mainly solves for us is zero day and unknown attack vectors. Right now every customer facing app and all our internal admin portals run behind F5 Distributed Cloud WAF. We've also wired it into our SIEM and SOAR tools to enrich alerts with traffic metadata and auto-initiate playbooks.

Pros

  • Identifying exposure risks
  • Mitigating bot and automation abuse
  • The superb dynamic inspection capabilities

Cons

  • Policy testing in pre production still requires some finesse. Maybe a sandbox environment with traffic replay built in would go a long way.
  • The biggest gain for us was speed. Before F5 Distributed Cloud WAF, onboarding a new app to our WAF stack meant manual rule tuning, traffic sampling and regression testing. Right now, we spin up a service, tag it with the right policy and its ready (production ready) within hours
I have already talked about this in a previous question about my experience.
Yes
We considered Cloudflare in the first place because it came with strong appeal upfront, it's easy to deploy especially for small web apps. We even ran a few pilot tests with it during client rollouts but settled on F5 Distributed Cloud WAF instead. Main reason being its unmatched strength in understanding application behavior.

Do you think F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)'s feature set?

Yes

Did F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) again?

Yes

Well in my organization, we use F5 Distributed Cloud WAF to secure all client facing APIs and web services across our multi-cloud environments. Our agency builds and deploys web apps for clients in different fields. These apps often have a short sprint cycles, frequent releases and just varying API architectures. Now that opens a lot of surface area for attacks and that's where F5 Distributed Cloud WAF comes in.

Using F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

6 - Since I have the most hands on experience with the Voltmesh module, I'll base my responses around that. Roughly 6 to 7 people actively interact with it. This includes everyone in the core security team, platform engineering and a few site reliability engineers.
4 - You'll need a really strong hybrid skillset to manage it properly. F5 WAF isn't a tool to be handled by a one army. You need network security engineers who understand app layer threats, Ddos patterns and how to properly tune it. Any familiarity with Voltmesh routing will also give you so much leverage
  • Traffic segmentation for clients in tightly regulated industries
  • We are also pre deploying the WAF validation in CI/CD
  • Rate limiting freemium tiers for certain SAAS tools to keep compute costs predictable
  • Using Voltmesh to simulate attack traffic across regions during tabletop exercises. We spun up synthetic traffic from multiple edges to test failovers, WAF rules and geo based throttling
  • We're working on implementing it as a release gatekeeper. We'll attempt to tag early access users in feature rollouts, and use the waf policies to control who can hit the new routes - all without changing the app code.
We have some really exciting projects coming up, and F5 WAF is part and parcel. No way we would even consider dropping it at this stage. That would need a huge fallout from F5 which seems impossible

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