Troubleshooting: Determining the client's IP address

By default, and when it's efficient, Amazon Silk routes requests through a remote proxy server in the Amazon cloud. Thus, the source IP for a request may be that of the remote proxy, and not of the originating client.

Obtaining the Client IP Address

When Amazon Silk does not route requests through a remote proxy server, the source IP address of the request can be obtained as it normally would be on any HTTP request.

When browsing is routed through a remote proxy, the source IP address of the end client is supplied in the X-Forwarded-For request header. Note that different requests from a single end user may be routed through different cloud servers. In other words, a website may receive a series of requests from different source IP addresses but with the same X-Forwarded-For header.

Additionally, a single Amazon Silk cloud server can support multiple end users. This means that a website may see requests with the same source IP address but different X-Forwarded-For headers.