Amazon CloudFront Adds Geo Restriction Feature

Posted on: Dec 18, 2013

We are excited to announce Geo Restriction, a new feature that allows you to use Amazon CloudFront to restrict access to your content based on the geographic location of your viewers. With Geo Restriction you can choose the countries where you want Amazon CloudFront to deliver your content.

Geo Restriction is important for many customers. For example, licensing requirements restrict some media customers from delivering movies outside a single country. These customers can now configure a whitelist that only allows viewers in that country to access their videos. Other customers need to prevent the downloading of their encrypted software by users in certain countries. These customers can configure a blacklist of countries so end-users from those countries cannot download their software.

You can use the Amazon CloudFront API or the AWS Management Console to enable this feature and configure the list of countries that should be included in your whitelist or blacklist. If an end-user from a restricted country tries to download your content, Amazon CloudFront will block their access with a 403 Forbidden HTTP response. You can also configure Custom Error Pages to customize the message that Amazon CloudFront will send to your viewers in these circumstances.

There are no additional charges for using this feature. As with other Amazon CloudFront features, you pay only for what you use and there are no upfront fees or minimum monthly commitments. You can learn more about Geo Restriction by visiting the Amazon CloudFront Detail Page or by reading the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.