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If I have servers placed across the globe through AWS, Rackspace, some other cloud, or even bare metal, how do I direct traffic from, say Singapore, to a server instance living in the Asia region?

Is it some kind of load balancing, or DNS type things I would have to configure?

Thanks!

Albert Lim
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2 Answers2

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Use Route 53 Latency Based Routing: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/CreatingLatencyRRSets.html

UPDATE: Route 53 now support geolocation resource record sets: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/resource-record-sets-values-geo.html

Julio Faerman
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  • Julio Faeman, thank you. I'll read up on the documentation to see how they do it. Before Route 53 came along, do you think other big technologies did the same thing that Route 53 was doing to redirect global traffic? – Albert Lim May 01 '14 at 08:52
  • There are a couple ways to do this, some solutions use geolocation instead of latency, but i believe most use BGP Anycast to build latency based routing. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast – Julio Faerman May 01 '14 at 13:49
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As Julio pointed out Latency Based Routing on Route 53 is a good option for this. One downside if you're hoping to say users in China go to this datacenter Route 53 won't do that for you. Instead they are constantly measuring the latencies to each of the AWS datacenters and will simply send people to the best AWS option (of the ones you have configured). To be honest this is probably good enough for you.

Lots of other DNS providers have similar offerings. I believe they however mainly focus on letting you decide where each region should go. I'm not a huge fan of this approach but it does give you a bit more flexibility at a cost of effort and potentially performance (if you're worried about that).

Ben
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  • Ah, so this problem is solved at the DNS level, got it. I'll read up on how Route 53 does it, but I was also interested where in the OSI stack this problem is resolved. the DNS layer makes sense. I now wonder if the DNS providers simply look at the incoming IP, assume which area it is coming from, and redirect it. Thank you! – Albert Lim May 01 '14 at 08:55