What benefit does AWS WAF provide?

AWS WAF, or Web Application Firewall, is specifically designed to protect web applications from various types of vulnerabilities and attacks. Its main benefit is to safeguard applications against harmful traffic, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other common exploits that can jeopardize the security and integrity of web services.

By using AWS WAF, organizations can create custom rules that allow or block web requests based on specified criteria, including IP addresses, HTTP headers, or query string parameters. This proactive approach helps prevent malicious users from exploiting weaknesses in the application and ensures that legitimate users experience uninterrupted service.

The other choices address different functionalities that AWS does not provide through WAF. Monitoring network performance is about analyzing the efficiency of the network infrastructure, while automating instance scaling relates to adjusting the number of server instances based on demand, neither of which falls within the scope of a web application firewall. Lastly, storage optimization pertains to improving data storage efficiency, which is outside the focus of AWS WAF. Thus, the key benefit of AWS WAF is its role in protecting web applications from common exploits.