Inside Azure's DDoS Defense | Behind the Code

From the creator

How do Azure engineers distinguish a legitimate traffic surge from a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack without penalizing real customers? Karthik Uthaman, principal software engineer in Microsoft's Azure Front Door group, explains how traffic patterns and system resource usage help engineers tell the difference. In this episode of Behind the Code, Karthik takes the problem to the whiteboard. He walks through resource-based defenses, finding top traffic contributors in a multi-tenant service, and combining threat intelligence with client fingerprinting to distinguish legitimate requests from malicious automated traffic. ⭐ What You'll Learn - How DDoS attacks can exhaust CPU, memory, and network resources - Why resource protection goes beyond individual attack vectors - How requests per second (RPS) correlate with CPU utilization - Why per-IP rate limiting alone cannot distinguish all good and bad traffic - How Microsoft Threat Intelligence and JA4 fingerprints provide additional signals - Why probabilistic data structures support real-time, inline analysis 👥 Speaker Karthik Uthaman - Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft Azure Front Door group ⌨️ About Behind the Code Behind the Code explores the engineering challenges and technical decisions behind Microsoft's systems, with the people who build them. ✅ Chapter Markers 00:00 – Meet Azure Front Door engineer Karthik Uthaman 00:22 – Azure Front Door and content delivery networks 00:52 – Why ap

Published 2026-10-26 · Watch on YouTube ↗
Availability and playback restrictions are controlled by the original channel.