A security engineer has noticed an unusually high amount of traffic coming from a single...

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

To mitigate traffic volume from a specific IP address without entirely blocking it, AWS WAF’s rate-based rules are the appropriate solution. AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) provides rate-based rules that allow a user to count and limit the rate of requests from individual IP addresses.

A rate-based rule tracks the number of requests that each originating IP makes in a rolling five-minute period. If the number of requests exceeds a specified threshold, WAF applies an action such as block or count.

This makes AWS WAF an ideal tool to throttle traffic rather than block it, which directly meets the use case described.

Reference from AWS Certified Security - Specialty Official Guide:

This capability is part of AWS WAF’s standard feature set, explicitly covered under the topics of Logging and Monitoring and Mitigating DDoS and Abnormal Behavior. Rate-based rules are discussed as a method for limiting the number of incoming requests based on request patterns without denying access outright.