What is AWS Shield and what types of DDoS attacks does it protect against?

AWS Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards AWS compute applications. It offers two tiers: Standard, which is automatically enabled and provides baseline DDoS protection, and Advanced, which provides enhanced detection and mitigation capabilities. It protects against common network and transport layer attacks (Layer 3 & 4), such as UDP floods, SYN floods, and HTTP floods, as well as application layer attacks (Layer 7) like slow POST attacks and credential stuffing. Advanced also provides protection against more sophisticated and volumetric attacks.