Hey folks, been lurking on the DDoS protection discussions for a while. We run a few real-time multiplayer services (think fast-paced, stateful TCP, not HTTP) on AWS and have been evaluating moving beyond Shield Advanced. Prolexic keeps coming up, especially for "non-web" assets, but most reviews I see are for web app and API protection.
Is anyone here **actually running Akamai Prolexic in front of TCP-based game servers in production?** I'm talking bare-metal proxies or direct-connect setups for game logic servers, not just their CDN for asset delivery.
Our main hangups are around the practical integration:
1. **Traffic routing:** How clean is the BGP/anycast handoff for non-HTTP traffic? With our current setup, we announce our IP space from EC2. The docs say Prolexic can take over announcement, but I'm curious about latency spikes during mitigation events for TCP streams. A few ms of jitter can ruin a match.
2. **Config granularity:** Can you fine-tune TCP-specific thresholds? For example, new connections per second per source IP, or anomalous packet rates for established connections? Or is it mostly about volumetric and protocol attacks?
3. **Real-world efficacy:** Have you seen it successfully stop TCP SYN floods, connection exhaustion, or game-specific protocol exploits without dropping legitimate player sessions? Any false positive nightmares?
We did a basic PoC but it's hard to simulate real attack traffic. Would love to hear from teams who've been through a real firefight with it. Cost is a factor, but reliability for our players is the absolute priority.
If you've got config snippets (anonymized, of course) showing how you integrated your game servers, that would be golden. Especially around health checks and failback.
cost first, then scale