Can we use CloudFront with Geolocation policy or does CloudFront internally have this feature and can be used alone to satisfy? Or Route53 is a correct option while having the requirement to serve requests from the nearest geo-location for a global website to improve the customer experience.
Also, I am not clear whether we can use both CloudFront with Route53 together or not?
Thanks.
Both cloudfront and Route53 have different purpose.Route 53 is a DNS service whereas Cloudfront is CDN service to serve static (and dynamic) content.
You can use the cloudfront with Route 53 Geolocation Routing. But the location wise content delivery is already enabled in cloudfront, so geolocation policy wont help that much. If you are not using cloudfront and you want to distribute traffic based on user location, then you can use Route53 geolocation policy to route traffic to the nearest app server though ELB (elastic load balancer).For example, you might want all queries from Europe to be routed to an ELB load balancer in the Frankfurt region. So here you are deciding which server is going to serve the traffic from specific region. But in case of cloudfront, it caches the content at the nearest data center ( edge location), when the first request is hit. And next request from that region are automatically served through that edge location.
Cloudfront: It is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users. The content is cached at edge location (data center). In cloudfront you specify the distribution from where the content needs to be server.
Route 53: Its a DNS service which provide translation of your easily remember DNS name (like google.com) into more complex server name serving the actual content.
You can use cloudfront and Route53 together by creating alias record in route 53 which points to your cloudfront distribution.
Yes, You can use Route53 along with CloudFront for the best results with Alias records (When you purchase your domain with AWS only if you purchased it from outside AWS then you can directly configured/add your CloudFront details there as in this case adding Route53 will increase the number of ip visits. Read More here).
CloudFront will distribute your content over 100+ edge location which will decrease your response time with low latency and save your cost as well. It will deliver the content from the nearest location.
Route53 will manage your DNS things.
CloudFront is more than enough for the delivery of content from the nearest edge location. It will also help you to copy data to multiple edge locations as well.
It's like Content Delivery Network(CloudFront) + DNS(Route53).
Read this for good understanding.
When you create a web distribution, you specify where CloudFront sends requests for the files that it distributes to edge locations. CloudFront supports using Amazon S3 buckets and HTTP servers (for example, web servers) as origins.
Route53 is a DNS service and is an origin for data. The term Origin is a term for where the original data resides before it is cached in the CDN (CloudFront).
Related
My S3(front-end codes), and EC2(back-end codes) are BOTH linked to 'example.com'
What I like to do here is to direct users to view the pages, stored in S3, unless they input 'example.com/api/'on their browser.
In other words, 'example.com/api/' for the server access, and the other routes for the react app access.
which service should I use in AWS? CloudFront, Route53, Load Balance. I am so confused. thank you.
TLDR; Create a single CloudFront distribution for your domain with separate cache behaviors for each of the paths you need to support. You can easily add additional applications, control caching, or write edge functions (using Lambda#Edge or CloudFront Functions) for any further customization you might need.
Details: CloudFront allows you to configure multiple origins (e.g. S3, EC2, API Gateway, ELB, custom URLs, and so forth) and then create cache behaviors (routes) that direct traffic to the appropriate origin.
In your case, you would create a cache behavior of /api/* to point to your EC2 origin, and the default cache behavior (think of this as your fallback route) would point to your S3 origin for all requests that do not begin with /api/
You can create a subdomain say api.example.com using Route53, here is a document for that https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/create-subdomain-route-53/
And for routing traffic for the newly created subdomain go through this document https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-routing-traffic-for-subdomains.html
I have a custom origin i.e. a web app on an EC2 instance. How do I decide whether I should go for:
a Cloudfront CDN
or,
deploy multiple instances in different regions and configure a Geolocation/proximity based routing policy
The confusion arises from the fact that both aim at routing the request to the nearest location (edge location in case of Cloudfront and region specific EC2 instance when it comes to multi-region deployments with Geolocation based policy with Route 53) based on where the request originates from.
There is no reason why you can't do both.
CloudFront automatically routes requests to an edge location nearest the viewer, and when a request can't be served from that location or the nearest regional cache, CloudFront does a DNS lookup for the origin domain name and fetches the content from the origin.
So far, I've only really stated the obvious. But up next is a subtle but important detail:
CloudFront does that origin server DNS lookup from a location that is near the viewer -- which means that if the origin domain name is a latency-based record set in Route 53, pointing to deployments in two or more EC2 regions, then the request CloudFront makes to "find" the origin will be routed to the origin deployment nearest the edge, which is also by definition going to be near to the viewer.
So a single, global CloudFront deployment can automatically and transparently select the best origin, using latency-based configuration for the backend's DNS configuration.
If the caching and transport optimizations provided by CloudFront do not give you the global performance you require, then you can deploy in multiple regions, behind CloudFront... being mindful, always, that a multi-region deployment is almost always a more complex environment, depending on the databases that are backing your application and how they are equipped to handle cross-region replication for reads and/or writes.
Including CloudFront as the front-end is also a better solution for fault tolerance among multiple regional deployments, because CloudFront correctly honors the DNS TTL on your origin server's DNS record, and if you have Route 53 health checks configured to take an unhealthy region out of the DNS response on the origin domain name, CloudFront will quickly stop sending further requests to it. Browsers are notoriously untrustworthy in this regard, sometimes caching a DNS answer until all tabs/windows are closed.
And if CloudFront is your front-end, you can offload portions of your logic to Lambda#Edge if desired.
You can use multi region for lot reasons mainly,
Proximity
Failover (incase if first region fails, requests can be sent to another region)
Multi region lambda deployment is clearly documented here. You can apply the same logic to all of the AWS Resources too. (DynamoDB, S3)
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-a-multi-region-serverless-application-with-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-lambda/
You can also run Lambda#Edge to force all your requests / splits to one region on the edge.
Hope it helps.
So currently we have two ec2 instances (lets say A and B) and a cloudfront.
If the user goes to www.appdomain.com/app the user should get routed to the cloudfront SPA page. However if the user goes www.appdomain.com the user should be routed to the EC2 instance A, and if user goes to www.appdomain.com/api be routed to EC2 instance B.
All of these applications must be on the same domain.
Now we found out how to set path rules using an application load balancer, but would like to know how to set it to cloudfront as well.
Update:
So in summary the question is how do we route /app to cloudfront / and /api to ec2.
All of these applications must be on the same domain.
In this scenario, every request for that domain must pass through CloudFront first.
Your DNS record will need to point to CloudFront (not the ALB) and CloudFront is then responsible for routing the request to the appropriate target -- to an EC2 instance via an ALB, to an S3 bucket, to wherever you need the requests to go -- and each of these things is called a content origin.
Once the origins are specified by their individual domain name (not your site's domain name, but a domain name specifically for the resource in question), you define CloudFront path patterns to select which origin is to receive the request for each pattern (e.g. /api*).
Once your DNS is changed to point to CloudFront, all requests go there first, and are handed off to the next service, unless CloudFront has a cached copy of the requested object -- in which case, CloudFront will serve it from its cache, and nothing will be sent to the origin.
You can't route from ALB to CloudFront, but you can route from CloudFront to ALB.
You can't subdivide a domain into multiple, different path-based content origins without using a reverse proxy that is able to match the paths and fetch the content on behalf of the requester -- HTTP and DNS don't support such functionality. CloudFront, in addition to providing the CDN service, is also a reverse proxy.
ALB, of course, is also a reverse proxy, but does not support as many different types of content origins as CloudFront does -- ALB only supports EC2 instances, servers in your data center (in which case, ALB must have a VPN path in order to reach them), and Lambda functions as content origins. CloudFront can use literally anything as a content origin as long as it speaks HTTP/HTTPS and is accessible via the Internet. (To choose a somewhat random example, CloudFront can even use a service from another vendor -- like a Google Cloud Storage bucket -- as a content origin, if that was something you needed to do, for whatever reason... because these are accessible via HTTP across the public Internet.)
First time here but have used help from here a lot.
I managed to find some answers from this thread
Cloudfront and EC2
But as it is mentioned in answer, this issue is happening for me
“Be sure, when you connect through CloudFront, that the server doesn't redirect you back to the EC2 hostname or IP (the address bar in the browser will change, if it does, and you'll want to fix your web server's config if that happens).”
So for this do I need to change anything on httpd.conf?
Or ec2’s firewall? I am using amazon AMI with LAMP
Thanks
Pramit
It means that when your application points to another page in the app (eg index.html pointing to about.html), you should use relative references (/about.html rather than http://1.2.3.4/about.html).
This way, traffic coming in through CloudFront will continue to come in through CloudFront rather than be redirected elsewhere.
Update:
Let's say your configuration is:
A single Amazon EC2 instance with an Elastic IP address
A CloudFront distribution
Your own domain name that you'd like to point to CloudFront
In this case, you would:
Configure a CNAME record (eg www.example.com) on your Domain (on Route 53 or your DNS provider) to point to the CloudFront distribution URL
Configure Alternate Domain Names (CNAMEs) in CloudFront with your CNAME (www.example.com) -- this is so that it knows what domain name is being used to send requests to CloudFront
Set origin to the Elastic IP address of your EC2 instance -- this is where CloudFront obtains the information that it should cache and serve
If you want CloudFront to fetch data from a sub-path (sub-directory) of the origin, then set origin path to that path. For example, you might want to serve content from /dev or /prod.
See: Values That You Specify When You Create or Update a Web Distribution - Amazon CloudFront
How does cloudfront work with Route53 routing policies?
So as I understand it CF is supposed to route requests to the nearest server, which is in effect the Route53 latency policy. So if you have an R53 hosted zone entry for your CF domain name is this done by default if you leave the routing policy as simple or do you neec to explicitly set this yourself? And if you chose another policy type (failover, geo-location etc) would that overwrite it?
You leave it as simple.
You don't have access to the necessary information to actually configure it yourself -- CloudFront returns an appropriate DNS response based on the location of the requester, from a single, simple DNS record. The functionality and configuration is managed transparently by the logic that powers the cloudfront.net domain, you set it and forget it, because there are no user-serviceable parts inside.
This is true whether you use an A-record Alias or a CNAME.
Any other configuration would not really make sense, because talking of failover or geolocation imply that you'd want to send traffic somewhere other than where CloudFront's algorithm would send it.
Now... there are cases when, behind CloudFront, you might want to use some of Route 53's snazzier options. Let's say you had app servers in multiple regions serving exactly the same content. Latency-based routing for the origin hostname (the one where CloudFront sends cache misses) would allow CloudFront to magically send requests to the app server closest to the CloudFront edge that serves each individual request. This would be unrelated to the routing from the browser to the edge, though.