Building a Rack::Attack Dashboard

At BackerKit, we occasionally see high volumes of traffic from malicious clients. (Kickstarter has faced a similar problem.) These DDoS attacks result in degraded performance and frustrate our customers. Not cool!

We implemented Kickstarter’s Rack::Attack and configured constraints on the number of requests allowed in a time period based on IP address on our troublesome endpoints. Yay, problem solved!

Like most tools, Rack::Attack requires tuning; our initial stab at configuration led to customers being blocked. We needed a way to clear out blocked IPs that were friendly.

Read more on BackerKit’s blog.