How to direct traffic to different servers per geographic location?

Question

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!

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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).