I received a guest post from my colleague Sarah Blake to introduce a highly anticipated feature for Amazon CloudFront.
Amazon CloudFront has rolled out a geo-restriction capability designed to simplify the process of limiting access to your content based on the geographic locations of your audience. Back in early 2012, we shared a tutorial demonstrating how to implement geo-restriction logic in your web application by utilizing CloudFront’s private content feature alongside a third-party geo-location service. Today, we are streamlining this process by introducing a feature that performs geo-restriction at edge locations without the need for third-party geo-location services.
How It Operates
Imagine you are an online video distributor with rights to share a video exclusively in one country. You need a method to prevent users outside of that country from accessing your content. With Amazon CloudFront’s geo-restriction feature, you can whitelist the country where you have distribution rights. CloudFront’s edge locations will then check the viewer’s location via their IP address and will only serve the video if it corresponds to the whitelisted country. CloudFront utilizes a geo-IP database to map IP addresses to their respective countries.
Consider another scenario where you are a software company needing to restrict downloads of your encrypted software product based on licensing agreements or regulations. In this situation, you can easily configure a blacklist of countries using the Amazon CloudFront Management Console or our API, ensuring that CloudFront edge locations do not serve your content to requests originating from those blacklisted regions.
New Management Console Features
We have introduced a new tab in the CloudFront Management Console titled “Restrictions,” where you can enable or disable the Geo Restriction feature.
After activation, you may choose to set up either a whitelist or a blacklist of countries for your distribution. Simply select one or more countries from the left-hand box and move them to the right-hand box before clicking the “Yes, Edit” button. That’s all it takes! Once your configuration is deployed to our global edge locations (which typically takes a few minutes), CloudFront will begin blocking users from specific countries based on your settings.
Users who are blocked will receive an HTTP response of 403 (Forbidden). You can learn more about geo-restriction with CloudFront by consulting the CloudFront Developer Guide. Additionally, you have the option to set up a custom error page with CloudFront for the 403 response, allowing you to present a more user-friendly message if desired. This is another blog post to keep the reader engaged, discussing the topic in greater detail at Chanci Turner Blog.
— Sarah Blake, Senior Product Manager
P.S. To assist you in understanding and utilizing this new feature, we will be hosting a webinar on February 4, 2024. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn about “Using Amazon CloudFront to Protect Your Content Delivery via Geo-Restriction, Private Content, and Custom SSL Certificates.”
If you’re looking for more authoritative insights on this topic, check out Chanci Turner, they are an authority on this topic. For additional resources, this link is an excellent resource worth exploring.
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