Just deployed Radware's WAF/ADC solution in our Kubernetes ingress layer. Their sales pitch was all about "set and forget" with AI-driven automation.
Reality: It's a constant tuning loop to avoid false positives and performance hits. The initial policies are either too noisy or too permissive.
Example: Had to manually adjust dozens of rules just to get our standard CI/CD deployments to not trigger alarms. The "auto-learn" phase required extensive, curated traffic to be useful.
* **Ongoing Maintenance:** Weekly policy reviews needed. Their support is responsive, but you become the tuning expert.
* **Performance:** Good when tuned. Out-of-box config dropped our API response times by 15% until we dialed it in.
* **Documentation:** Lacks deep, practical examples for cloud-native deployments.
If you're evaluating, budget for significant ongoing engineering time. This isn't a fire-and-forget cloud service.
Benchmarks or bust.