Can we use CloudFront with Geolocation policy or does CloudFront internally have this feature and can be used alone to satisfy? Or Route53 is a correct option while having the requirement to serve requests from the nearest geo-location for a global website to improve the customer experience.
Also, I am not clear whether we can use both CloudFront with Route53 together or not? Thanks.
Yes, You can use Route53 along with CloudFront for the best results with Alias records (When you purchase your domain with AWS only if you purchased it from outside AWS then you can directly configured/add your CloudFront details there as in this case adding Route53 will increase the number of ip visits. Read More here).
CloudFront will distribute your content over 100+ edge location which will decrease your response time with low latency and save your cost as well. It will deliver the content from the nearest location.
Route53 will manage your DNS things.
CloudFront is more than enough for the delivery of content from the nearest edge location. It will also help you to copy data to multiple edge locations as well.
It's like Content Delivery Network(CloudFront) + DNS(Route53).
Read this for good understanding.
When you create a web distribution, you specify where CloudFront sends requests for the files that it distributes to edge locations. CloudFront supports using Amazon S3 buckets and HTTP servers (for example, web servers) as origins.
Route53 is a DNS service and is an origin for data. The term Origin is a term for where the original data resides before it is cached in the CDN (CloudFront).
Both cloudfront and Route53 have different purpose.Route 53 is a DNS service whereas Cloudfront is CDN service to serve static (and dynamic) content.
cloudfront with Route 53 Geolocation Routing. But the location wise content delivery is already enabled in cloudfront, so geolocation policy wont help that much. If you are not using cloudfront and you want to distribute traffic based on user location, then you can use Route53 geolocation policy to route traffic to the nearest app server though ELB (elastic load balancer).For example, you might want all queries from Europe to be routed to an ELB load balancer in the Frankfurt region. So here you are deciding which server is going to server the traffic from specific region. but in case of cloudfront, it caches the content at the nearest data center ( edge location), when the first request is hit. And next request from that region are automatically served through that edge location. Cloudfront: It is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users. The content is cached at edge location (data center). In cloudfront you specify the distribution from where the content needs to be server.
Route 53: Its a DNS service which provide translation of your easily remember DNS name (like google.com) into more complex server name serving the actual content.