This component is responsible for enabling AWS Shield Advanced Protection for the following resources:

• Application Load Balancers (ALBs)
• CloudFront Distributions
• Elastic IPs (NAT Gateways, EC2 instances)
• Route53 Hosted Zones

AWS Shield is a managed DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS.

AWS Shield has two tiers:

This component configures AWS Shield Advanced protection for specific resources.

This component requires that the account where it is being provisioned has been subscribed to AWS Shield Advanced.

Important: The Shield Advanced subscription is a manual step that must be completed before deploying this component:

# Subscribe via AWS CLI
aws shield create-subscription

# Or subscribe via AWS Console:
# AWS Shield → Getting started → Subscribe to Shield Advanced

This component assumes that resources it is configured to protect are not already protected by other components that have their xxx_aws_shield_protection_enabled variable set to true.

Tip

👽 Use Atmos with Terraform

Cloud Posse uses atmos to easily orchestrate multiple environments using Terraform.
Works with Github Actions, Atlantis, or Spacelift.

Watch demo of using Atmos with Terraform

Example of running atmos to manage infrastructure from our Quick Start tutorial.

Stack Level: Global or Regional

AWS Shield Advanced protects both global and regional resources. Deploy this component to the appropriate stack level based on the resources you want to protect:

The following snippet shows how to use all of this component's features in a stack configuration:

components:
  terraform:
    aws-shield:
      metadata:
        component: aws-shield
      settings:
        spacelift:
          workspace_enabled: true
      vars:
        enabled: true
        # Global resources
        route53_zone_names:
          - example.com
          - api.example.com
        cloudfront_distribution_ids:
          - E1ABCDEFG12345
          - E2BCDEFGH23456
        # Regional resources
        alb_protection_enabled: true
        alb_names:
          - k8s-common-2c5f23ff99
          - api-gateway-alb
        eips:
          - 3.214.128.240    # NAT Gateway AZ-a
          - 35.172.208.150   # NAT Gateway AZ-b
          - 35.171.70.50     # Bastion host

A typical global configuration includes Route53 hosted zones and CloudFront distributions. Global stacks typically don't have a VPC, so alb_names and eips should not be defined:

# stacks/catalog/aws-shield/global.yaml
components:
  terraform:
    aws-shield:
      metadata:
        component: aws-shield
      settings:
        spacelift:
          workspace_enabled: true
      vars:
        enabled: true
        route53_zone_names:
          - example.com
          - internal.example.com
        cloudfront_distribution_ids:
          - E1ABCDEFG12345

Regional configurations protect ALBs and Elastic IPs. CloudFront distributions should not be defined in regional stacks (they are global resources):

# stacks/catalog/aws-shield/regional.yaml
components:
  terraform:
    aws-shield:
      metadata:
        component: aws-shield
      settings:
        spacelift:
          workspace_enabled: true
      vars:
        enabled: true
        # Protect ALBs by name
        alb_protection_enabled: true
        alb_names:
          - k8s-common-2c5f23ff99
        # Protect Elastic IPs (NAT Gateways, EC2 instances)
        eips:
          - 3.214.128.240
          - 35.172.208.150
        # Regional Route53 zones (if any)
        route53_zone_names:
          - us-east-1.example.com

When alb_protection_enabled is true and alb_names is empty, the component automatically discovers ALB names from the eks/alb-controller-ingress-group component via remote state:

components:
  terraform:
    aws-shield:
      vars:
        enabled: true
        # Enable ALB protection with auto-discovery
        alb_protection_enabled: true
        # alb_names is intentionally empty - will be discovered from EKS ALB controller

Create a catalog defaults file that can be imported and customized per environment:

# stacks/catalog/aws-shield/defaults.yaml
components:
  terraform:
    aws-shield:
      metadata:
        component: aws-shield
      vars:
        enabled: true
        alb_protection_enabled: false
        alb_names: []
        eips: []
        route53_zone_names: []
        cloudfront_distribution_ids: []

Then import and override in your stack:

# stacks/orgs/acme/platform/prod/us-east-1/shield.yaml
import:
  - catalog/aws-shield/defaults

components:
  terraform:
    aws-shield:
      vars:
        alb_protection_enabled: true
        alb_names:
          - prod-api-alb
        eips:
          - 52.1.2.3

Stack configurations that rely on components with a xxx_aws_shield_protection_enabled variable should set that variable to true and leave the corresponding variable for this component empty, relying on that component's AWS Shield Advanced functionality instead. This simplifies inter-component dependencies and minimizes the need for maintaining the provisioning order during a cold-start.

Use the following AWS CLI commands to find resource identifiers:

# List ALB names
aws elbv2 describe-load-balancers --query 'LoadBalancers[*].LoadBalancerName' --output table

# List Elastic IPs
aws ec2 describe-addresses --query 'Addresses[*].[PublicIp,AllocationId,Tags[?Key==`Name`].Value|[0]]' --output table

# List Route53 hosted zones
aws route53 list-hosted-zones --query 'HostedZones[*].[Name,Id]' --output table

# List CloudFront distributions
aws cloudfront list-distributions --query 'DistributionList.Items[*].[Id,DomainName,Origins.Items[0].DomainName]' --output table

After deployment, verify resources are protected:

# List all protected resources
aws shield list-protections --query 'Protections[*].[Name,ResourceArn]' --output table

# Describe a specific protection
aws shield describe-protection --resource-arn <resource-arn>

# Check subscription status
aws shield describe-subscription

{
  "additional_tag_map": {},
  "attributes": [],
  "delimiter": null,
  "descriptor_formats": {},
  "enabled": true,
  "environment": null,
  "id_length_limit": null,
  "label_key_case": null,
  "label_order": [],
  "label_value_case": null,
  "labels_as_tags": [
    "unset"
  ],
  "name": null,
  "namespace": null,
  "regex_replace_chars": null,
  "stage": null,
  "tags": {},
  "tenant": null
}

[
  "default"
]

Check out these related projects.

• terraform-aws-waf - Terraform module to create and manage AWS WAF rules for additional application-layer protection
• aws-wafv2 Component - Cloud Posse component for AWS WAFv2, often used alongside Shield Advanced
• Cloud Posse Terraform Modules - Our collection of reusable Terraform modules used by our reference architectures.
• Atmos - Atmos is like docker-compose but for your infrastructure

For additional context, refer to some of these links.

• AWS Shield Documentation - Official AWS Shield documentation
• AWS Shield Advanced Developer Guide - Comprehensive guide for AWS Shield Advanced features and configuration
• Subscribing to AWS Shield Advanced - Step-by-step instructions for subscribing to Shield Advanced
• AWS Shield Pricing - Pricing details for AWS Shield Advanced ($3,000/month per organization)
• DDoS Response Team (DRT) Support - How to engage AWS DDoS Response Team during attacks
• AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency - AWS whitepaper on DDoS mitigation best practices
• Terraform aws_shield_protection Resource - Terraform documentation for the aws_shield_protection resource
• cloudposse-terraform-components - Cloud Posse's upstream component repository

This project is under active development, and we encourage contributions from our community.

Many thanks to our outstanding contributors:

For 🐛 bug reports & feature requests, please use the issue tracker.

In general, PRs are welcome. We follow the typical "fork-and-pull" Git workflow.

1. Review our Code of Conduct and Contributor Guidelines.
2. Fork the repo on GitHub
3. Clone the project to your own machine
4. Commit changes to your own branch
5. Push your work back up to your fork
6. Submit a Pull Request so that we can review your changes

NOTE: Be sure to merge the latest changes from "upstream" before making a pull request!

We use Atmos to streamline how Terraform tests are run. It centralizes configuration and wraps common test workflows with easy-to-use commands.

All tests are located in the test/ folder.

Under the hood, tests are powered by Terratest together with our internal Test Helpers library, providing robust infrastructure validation.

Setup dependencies:

• Install Atmos (installation guide)
• Install Go 1.24+ or newer
• Install Terraform or OpenTofu

To run tests:

• Run all tests:

  atmos test run

• Clean up test artifacts:

  atmos test clean

• Explore additional test options:

  atmos test --help

The configuration for test commands is centrally managed. To review what's being imported, see the atmos.yaml file.

Learn more about our automated testing in our documentation or implementing custom commands with atmos.

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