This article is more than 1 year old

AWS imposes national borders on Cloudland

'Geo Restriction' feature keeps foreign undesirables away from your content

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has drawn up borders within its cloud with a new 'Geostriction' feature for its CloudFront service.

CloudFront is AWS' content distribution offering and speeds downloads for all manner of media, often by locating it closer to users.

AWS can now ensure that only the users you want – or at least those within borders you desire – can access content served from CloudFront thanks to the Geo Restriction feature. Amazon says the new feature means “you can choose the countries where you want Amazon CloudFront to deliver your content.”

You might wish to do that, AWS says, because “licensing requirements restrict some media customers from delivering movies outside a single country.” Or you might be a Chinese company who's just signed up for AWS' new Beijing region and has been told not to allow anything to escape the Great Firewall.

Whatever the reason AWS users desire “Geo Restriction”, they'll get the chance to make custom 403 pages to explain the block to their end users. Another small upside: the service is free! ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like