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Many folks are familiar with Cloudflare from the context of their CDN and DDoS mitigation abilities for web applications. Let’s start with a brief overview and background of both companies. We will answer the questions: Can F5 or Cloudflare run as a virtual appliance in AWS, Azure, or GCP? What about as a hardware solution for big honkin’ traffic situations? We’ll cover all that and more, plus help you decide which solution is right for you.
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We’ll also highlight other ways you can & can’t run the solutions. Both solutions are SaaS-based, ie proxied from F5’s & CF’s cloud & data center presences. You can also consider this the Cloudflare WAF vs F5 WAF while securing APIs article 😉. Specifically, we’ll be focused on http web app & API security, comparing the WAAP (Web Application and API Protection) functionality between Cloudflare’s WAF offering and F5’s Distributed Cloud (F5 XCS) WAAP offering.
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F5 vs Cloudflare – In this series of articles, we will start picking apart these two solutions and help you decide which best secure web applications in your organization.
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