Amazon CloudFront Adds Device Detection, Geo Targeting, Host Header Forwarding, CORS Support, and more!

Posted on: Jun 26, 2014

Starting today, you can use Amazon CloudFront to further customize or personalize your dynamic content delivery. You can now configure Amazon CloudFront to forward request headers to your origin and deliver customized content to your end users depending on the characteristics of their request, such as the device they are using to access your site or the country from which they access your content.

The new features that we are introducing mean that you can now use Amazon CloudFront for:

  • Mobile Device Detection: You can now cache and deliver customized content to your viewers on different devices (e.g. mobile vs. desktop) based on the value of the User Agent header.
  • Geo Targeting: Amazon CloudFront will now detect the country where your viewer is located and forward the country code to your origin server so that you can personalize content for that viewer without changing the URL.
  • Multi-Site Hosting: If you host multiple applications on the same origin web server, Amazon CloudFront can now be configured to pass the Host Header to your custom origin server and cache responses specific to each host name.
  • Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS): You can now configure Amazon CloudFront to cache content based on the Origin Header. This means Amazon CloudFront will respect any CORS rules that your origin server has set up to provide access to the websites you want.
  • Protocol Detection: You can deliver different content to your viewers depending on whether they access your site over HTTP or HTTPS.

There are no additional charges for using this feature. To get started, simply use the Amazon CloudFront API or the AWS Management Console to select all or a whitelist of headers that you want forwarded to your custom origin server. Any header that is forwarded to the origin server will also be used to uniquely identify the object in Amazon CloudFront's cache. You can learn more about this feature by reading the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide or visiting the Amazon CloudFront Detail page.

You can also join our webinar at 10:00 AM PST on July 22nd, 2014 and learn more about "Amazon CloudFront Dynamic Content Delivery - Device Detection, Geo-Targeting, Host Header Forwarding, and CORS Support." Register Here for this Webinar.