Organizations require methods to restrict access to content to adhere to compliance and regulatory requirements, sanctions, privacy laws, territorial ownership rights, security controls, etc. One way that companies restrict access is by Geo-blocking – restricting access to a website or another piece of content based on a user’s location. A popular method of geo-blocking content is based on determining a user’s location using their IP address. However, this method is fairly simple to get around using technologies such as a Virtual Private Network (VPN). In this walkthrough, I dem ..read more

Introduction In this blog post, we will explain how you can use Lambda@Edge to authorize requests to Amazon CloudFront by forwarding authorization data to external authorization servers. We will outline the sequence of requests in such a workflow, the steps for implementation with Node.js sample code, and a CloudFormation template for a simple external test authorization server that uses header-based authorization. This blog will also walk you through additional optimizations and considerations. Secure distribution of content with CloudFront, such as downloads of games, software, documents and ..read more

Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) that makes it easy to deliver websites, videos, apps, and APIs securely and at high speeds with low latency. You can use CloudFront to reduce latency by delivering data through 400+ globally dispersed Points of Presence (PoPs) and improve security with traffic encryption, access controls, and resiliency against DDoS attacks. In addition to performance and security, CloudFront can be used to cost optimize your AWS infrastructure in various ways. In this post, we’ll cover numerous CloudFront features and best practices that can help op ..read more

Search engine crawlers – a special bot type used to index your site – are very important visitors. They make sure that your content is searchable by end users. If a crawler can’t easily read your content, then any updates you make might not be immediately reflected in the search results. Depending on the algorithms that the search engine uses, it could also affect where you appear in search results – your search ranking. Therefore, it’s important to make sure that search engine crawlers can read your content without additional processing, and that they can access your content as quickly as pos ..read more

Any web application using Amazon CloudFront benefits from the inherent high availability of this AWS service. It’s a globally distributed network that is immune to local hardware failures or network congestion. Furthermore, it’s built on top of the AWS global network, which provides better isolation from the public internet. Finally, it’s designed with various advanced engineering techniques to honor one of its top tenets: Service Availability. To learn more about these techniques, watch the following talks from past re:Invents: Design Patterns for High Availability: Lessons from Amazon CloudF ..read more

September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. This is the first post in a blog series about Amazon CloudFront migrations. CloudFront works with other AWS edge networking services, to provide content delivery, perimeter security, end-user routing, and edge compute. CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which places content closer to your end-users, improving performance and customer satisfaction. CloudFront supports functions and customization at the edge with edge computing features such as Lambda@Edge. End-user connecti ..read more

Introduction Today, viewing video content is a prevalent form of online activity whether in entertainment, education, marketing, or information. For example, as a Solutions Architect at AWS, I tend to watch hours of video a week to learn about technologies, and I also leverage video content to convey ideas and best practices in a scalable way. According to Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report in 2018, video accounts for almost 58% of the total downstream traffic on the internet. Research shows that the quality of streaming video has a considerable impact on user engagement, which determ ..read more

Special thanks to Raul Frias for contributing to this blog post Lambda@Edge enables you to run AWS Lambda functions globally so that you can process and respond to user requests at low latencies. Running Lambda functions in close geographical proximity to users helps satisfy a number of use cases, such as website personalization, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), URL re-writes, and A/B testing – just to name a few. Today we announced that Lambda@Edge can now access the HTTP Request Body. This functionality enables new use cases to leverage the benefits of edge computing. In this post, we’ll ta ..read more

What is Visitor Prioritization? If you’re an online retailer, the annual holiday season, special sales, and new product launches are all events that can drive a rapid increase in your website traffic. You can manage surges in customer traffic by building agile applications with AWS that scale in response to incoming traffic, using features like Auto-scaling and managed services such as Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB. However, you might have legacy applications that can’t be modified to scale seamlessly to handle a sudden increase in traffic. Or you might have certain situations where you wa ..read more

This blog post is the first in a series about Lambda@Edge best practices to help you optimize using Lambda@Edge throughout the life cycle of your application. Topics will include how to create the best Lambda@Edge design for your use case, how to integrate Lambda@Edge in your CI/CD pipeline, and how to make sure your solution is working well and addressing your business needs. In this first post, I’ll focus on best practices for designing Lambda@Edge solutions. I’ll share some common use cases when our customers have implemented Lambda@Edge solutions, explain how to choose when to trigger a La ..read more