Two of the most misunderstood security products in the market are Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and DDoS protection systems. They're often conflated, sometimes sold as the same product, and frequently misapplied. Here's how they differ — and why you need both.
What a WAF Does
A WAF inspects the content of individual HTTP requests against a ruleset — blocking SQL injection, XSS, path traversal, SSRF, and other application-layer attacks. It's a per-request decision engine. It assumes traffic volume is within normal parameters.
What DDoS Protection Does
DDoS protection absorbs or drops massive volumes of traffic before they can exhaust your infrastructure. It operates at the traffic volume level — rate limiting, challenge-response, signature detection across millions of packets per second. It doesn't care about SQL injection in the request body; it's managing whether the request gets processed at all.
The layering model
DDoS protection is the outer shell — it ensures your infrastructure stays up under attack. The WAF is the inner layer — it ensures requests that do reach your application are safe. Neither replaces the other.
Integration with Akarguard
Akarguard's reverse proxy handles L3–L7 DDoS at the traffic layer. You can run your WAF rules on Akarguard's proxy (we support custom rule configuration) or behind it on your origin servers. The proxy absorbs the flood; the WAF inspects the survivors.