What Is Reblaze? – Definition and How It Works

Learn what Reblaze is, how its per-site deployment model differs from shared CDNs, and how to identify it.

Reblaze is a cloud web application firewall and bot-management platform. Its distinguishing architectural choice is deploying a dedicated environment per customer rather than routing everyone through one shared network.

1. The Dedicated-Deployment Model

Most cloud WAFs are multi-tenant: all customers' traffic passes through the same shared edge. Reblaze provisions a private deployment in the customer's chosen cloud region.

The last row matters for identification: because each deployment is separate, the observable signatures are less uniform than for a shared network.

2. What It Does

3. Identifying It

The rbzid cookie is the clearest marker. As with other platforms, a bare vendor-name string in content is a weak signal that needs corroboration.

4. The Trade-off of Weaker Cross-Customer Intelligence

A shared network sees a source address misbehaving on many sites and can score it accordingly. A dedicated deployment mostly sees its own traffic.

Two practical consequences:

• Reputation carries less weight than on a network-wide platform, so a clean-behaving client from a datacenter address may fare better than it would behind a large shared edge.
• Per-site behaviour matters more, so request rate and pattern on that specific site are the dominant signals.

That shifts the emphasis: politeness on the site in front of you matters more than the general reputation of your address.

5. API Protection Is a Notable Feature

Reblaze emphasises protecting APIs specifically — validating requests against an expected schema and flagging behaviour that deviates from normal client patterns.

For anyone consuming a site's JSON endpoints, that has a direct implication: a request that is structurally unusual for that endpoint — unexpected parameters, absent expected headers, an implausible call sequence — can be flagged even when each individual value looks fine.

Mirroring the real client's request shape closely is therefore more important here than on a purely rule-based WAF.

6. Working With It

1. Persist cookies, since rbzid tracks the session.
2. Keep request rate modest — per-site behaviour is weighted heavily.
3. Match the real client's request shape when using JSON endpoints, including header set and ordering.
4. Validate content, not status, in case challenges return success codes.
5. Expect variation between sites, because each deployment is configured separately.

Point 5 is the operational reality: experience gained on one Reblaze-protected site transfers less reliably than it would for a shared platform.

7. Where It Sits in the Market

Reblaze competes with the large shared-edge platforms on control and data residency rather than on scale. Sites choosing it often have specific compliance or regional requirements, which is itself a hint about the operator's priorities — and usually implies a stricter posture on data access generally.

8. Summary

Reblaze is a cloud WAF and bot-management platform deployed per customer in a dedicated environment rather than through a shared edge, identified by the rbzid and rbzsessionid cookies.

The dedicated model means weaker cross-customer reputation intelligence and stronger weighting of your behaviour on that specific site, and its API-protection focus means matching the real client's request shape matters more than usual — while per-deployment configuration means findings transfer poorly between Reblaze-protected sites.

Potential Related Glossary

• DataDome
• IP Rotation
• Residential Proxies
• Web Crawling