Sanction Russia: Block traffic using CloudFront Geo Restriction

Russia attacked a sovereign state this week. Most states condemn the attack and impose sanctions. Among other things, sanctions are intended to mobilize the Russian population to rise up against their aristocrat Putin. As of today, cloudonaut is no longer accessible from Russia. We want to show solidarity with the Ukrainian people and make clear to the AWS community in Russia that we stand up for peace.

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We encourage you to follow us. If you use CloudFront as your CDN, the following CloudFormation and Terraform snippets enable CloudFront Geo Restriction to block traffic from Russia.

Block traffic from Russia with CloudFormation:

CloudFrontDistribution:
  Type: 'AWS::CloudFront::Distribution'
  Properties:
    DistributionConfig:
      # [...]
      Restrictions:
        GeoRestriction:
          Locations:
          - RU
          RestrictionType: blacklist

Block traffic from Russia with Terraform:

resource "aws_cloudfront_distribution" "distribution" {
  # [...]

  restrictions {
    geo_restriction {
      restriction_type = "blacklist"
      locations        = ["RU"]
    }
  }
}

With the geo restriction in place, visitors from Russia will receive a 403 (Forbidden) response from CloudFront.

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” Jimi Hendrix