Geolocation routing

With geolocation routing, you can choose the resources that serve your traffic based on where your users are located, meaning the location that DNS queries come from. For example, you might want all queries from Europe to be routed to an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer in the Frankfurt Region.

When you use geolocation routing, you can show your content in the language of your users. You can also use geolocation routing to limit content to only the locations where you have distribution rights. Another use is to balance load across endpoints in a way that is easy to predict and manage, so that each user location always goes to the same endpoint.

You can specify geographic locations by continent, by country, or by state in the United States. If you create separate records for overlapping geographic regions—for example, one record for North America and one for Canada—priority goes to the smallest geographic region. This allows you to route some queries for a continent to one resource and to route queries for selected countries on that continent to a different resource. (For a list of the countries on each continent, see Location.)

Geolocation works by mapping IP addresses to locations. However, some IP addresses aren't mapped to a location, so even if you create geolocation records that cover all seven continents, Amazon Route 53 will get some DNS queries from locations that it can't identify. You can create a default record that handles both queries from unmapped IP addresses and queries from locations where you haven't created geolocation records. If you don't create a default record, Route 53 returns a "no answer" response for queries from those locations.

You can use geolocation routing for records in both public and private hosted zones.

For more information, see How Amazon Route 53 uses EDNS0 to estimate the location of a user.

For information about values that you specify when you use the geolocation routing policy to create records, see the following topics: