AWS Route 53 Routing Policy: Geolocation Vs Latency

Question

AWS implements latency routing policy based on the ip address of resolver or masked ip address of client. It will help to find the region of low latency.

If both geolocation policy and latency policy are based on the IP address of client, it comes to several questions:

1. what's the difference between them?

2. What's the purpose of Geolocation routing policy?

3. Is geolocation policy used for complying the law of different country? e.g. GDPR, cookie usage.

   • Europe: GDPR
   • China: data must be stored in China.

4. In which case should I use Geolocation routing policy rather than latency policy?

Reference

how does AWS Route 53 achieve latency based routing:

• https://youtu.be/PVBC1gb78r8?t=1963

• https://youtu.be/PcoQY82SDHw?t=622

  How does AWS Route 53 achieve latency based routing?

Answer 1

Amazon maps-out typical latency between IP addresses and AWS regions. Choose Latency-based Routing to have the fastest response.

Geolocation maps the IP addresses to geographic locations. This permits rules like "send all users from Côte d'Ivoire to the website in France", so they see a language-specific version. It can redirect by country, region (eg Oceania) and US state. Geolocation cares more about the location of users rather than the speed of their connection.

Geolocation pre-dates GDPR. It could be used for geo-blocking, but this is typically done in Amazon CloudFront: Restricting the Geographic Distribution of Your Content - Amazon CloudFront