I have my site set up running WordPress on EC2, with the domain set up with Route 53 and CloudFront.
Currently, all non-Australian visitors are set up to be blocked from the site with CloudFront restriction.
I need to set it up so that non-Australian visitors get directed to the .com domain.
Any insight on how to achieve this in AWS?
Amazon Route 53 can provide geolocation routing where DNS names are resolved differently based upon the location of the DNS request.
For example, you can configure Route 53 so that a DNS request coming from Australia is sent to a CloudFront distribution, while other ('default') requests are sent to a different location (eg a CNAME record pointing to a different .com domain). CloudFront can then do an extra level of enforcement to prevent users from bypassing the DNS location check (as you currently have it configured).
Thus, it is actually Amazon Route 53 that will decide where to send the traffic, prior to hitting Amazon CloudFront.
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I am new to AWS Route53 and trying to brush up some of the basics. I have a question that might sound silly.
Lets say i have a public load balancer created with its DNS (AWS auto generated). Now i went ahead and got my corporate company to create a CName for the actual ELB A record, so say that CNAME is www.my-website.com.
Now when users start browsing www.my-website.com, their router DNS directly know where this public www.my-website.com is hosted and then once the DNS resolution happens, the request is directly forwarded to my ELB that has that CName to it.
Now all this is good but i would also like to play with Route53 here, so i go ahead and use Route53 to create a hosted zone and add my domain www.my-website.com under it and then create a record set with alias pointing to my actual ELB followed by rest of the configuration.
Now when someone hits www.my-website.com on their browser will the request directly go to the ELB or go to Route53 that will then route it to that ELB?
A summary of what these services provides is below:
Route 53 is a DNS Provider provided as a service by AWS. The functionality you're describing using is to store your DNS records within it for resolution.
An ELB is an appliance to distribute traffic across multiple nodes.
With your records in Route 53 the below journey takes place:
When a client in the browser attempts to go to www.example.com it will first check in its internal cache for any previously stored values for the domain, if theres a value it will be evaluated against a TTL to see if it has been expired.
If no value or expired the client will connect to the root domain, then the top level domain continuing until it finds the DNS provider for your domain (. -> .com. -> example.com..
Once it finds this DNS provider it will query for your domain, if it matches it will return the resolution value and the TTL.
If the value is that of a CNAME (such as an ELB) this process will begin again to resolves the IP address(es) for your hostname. This IP address will be cached by your local client.
If you're using Route 53 and an ELB one advantage would be to use Alias records they actually set your domain record to the IP address which improves the speed of DNS resolution.
So in summary Route 53 is only contacted if the client does not know the resolution value for your domain.
I have purchased my domain(artykart.com) from GoDaddy.I want to add a subdomain to the existing domain named india.artykart.com. I want to direct visitors from India to the subdomain (india.artykart.com) when they type in artykart.com. So basically I want to add a region-specific subdomain. My hosting is on google cloud platform.
DNS servers do NOT support geolocation-based redirects to a subdomain.
This means that your website artykart.com will need to use a Geolocation service. Then redirect the user to india.artykart.com.
You can have webservers running for the same domain name in different locations in the world. There are DNS servers such as AWS Route 53 which offer geolocation but for a domain, not a redirect to another domain/subdomain. With Route 53 you can have a website in major world locations and use Route 53 to send traffic to a webserver serving that region.
Note: Geolocation is not a reliable service. This is a best-case guess by the geolocation service. An IP address location for major companies such as Google is the company's registered mail address and not by the data center that the IP is used.
Neither GoDaddy DNS nor Google Cloud DNS offers these services.
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).
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.
I have to configure a DNS table to route traffic in different paths of a CloudFront distribution.
example:
www.mydomain.com, policy geo ITALY, CNAME d1111111.cloudfront.net/IT/index.html
www.mydomain.com, policy geo IRELAND, CNAME d1111111.cloudfront.net/IE/index.html
Route 53 does not consider /it/index.html.
Other solutions?
A path is relevant to the HTTP protocol. DNS is a separate protocol and is only concerned with DNS to IP conversions.
The use of geo routing is not entirely correct in this case. GEO routing is intended to route a client to the closest datacenter, not present different content. This already happens with cloudfront anyway.
Instead you should handle this within your by either doing an IP lookup or using the browser locale. Sometimes the detection is wrong and a user should have the ability to manually change the auto detection. If the user changes thier locale, it should persist for the entire session.