In today's web environments, applications face not only legitimate high traffic but also malicious spikes such as DDoS attacks, scraping bots, and brute-force attempts. Traditional rate limiting, while effective to some extent, often falls short in distributed environments. This is where Distributed Rate Limiting becomes crucial.
What is Distributed Rate Limiting?
Distributed Rate Limiting is a technique used to control the number of requests a user or client can make to a system within a given time window, across multiple servers or nodes in a distributed infrastructure.
Instead of rate-limiting each server individually, which could allow attackers to bypass limits by targeting different nodes, distributed rate limiting uses a centralized or synchronized system to track and enforce limits globally.
Key Benefits
- ✅ Global Enforcement: No matter which server the user connects to, the same rate limits apply.
- ✅ Prevents Bypass: Attackers can't circumvent limits by hopping across nodes.
- ✅ Scalable: Suitable for modern cloud and microservice architectures.
- ✅ Accurate Throttling: Better protection against Layer 7 attacks such as login abuse, scraping, and API flooding.
How It Works
Distributed rate limiting typically involves:
- A shared in-memory store (e.g., Redis, etcd) to track request counts and timestamps.
- Each node checks the shared store before allowing requests to proceed.
- Once the threshold is reached, requests are blocked or delayed consistently across all nodes.
Use Cases
- Protecting login endpoints from brute-force attempts.
- Limiting API usage per user or IP.
- Mitigating DDoS attacks at the application layer.
About the Author
Hi, I’m Carrie, an engineer working on SafeLine WAF, an open-source, self-hosted web application firewall developed by Chaitin Tech. My focus is on building simple yet effective security solutions that help developers and IT teams protect their web infrastructure.
About SafeLine WAF
SafeLine is a modern Web Application Firewall (WAF) that uses a semantic analysis engine to detect attacks with high precision and low false positives. Key features include:
- Http Flood Mitigation: rate limiting & waiting room
- Identity Authentication
- Bot Protection
- Allow & Deny Rule Customization
- Real-time attack logs and alerting
- Support for high availability and multi-node deployments
SafeLine is trusted by thousands of users across Europe, Southeast Asia, South America, and the Middle East. Whether you're a solo developer or a DevSecOps team, SafeLine provides a flexible and powerful solution to secure your web applications.
Learn more:
SafeLine Website: https://ly.safepoint.cloud/ShZAy9x
Live Demo: https://demo.waf.chaitin.com:9443/statistics
Discord: https://discord.gg/dy3JT7dkmY
Doc: https://docs.waf.chaitin.com/en/home
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