IP geolocation variables: Migrating to the new dataset

Last updated August 02, 2018

Fastly's IP geolocation variables are now based on a new IP geolocation dataset. Following Fastly's feature retirement policy, we'll continue to support variables that use the older version of the geolocation dataset until all of our customers have had time to migrate their service configurations to the newer version. As you migrate your configurations, keep the following important considerations in mind.

Namespaces differ between versions

The old version of the IP geolocation variables exist in the geoip namespace. The new version of these variables exist in the client.geo namespace and the Autonomous System (AS) variables exist in the client.as namespace.

Results for IPv6 addresses will only be returned for client.geo and client.as namespaces.

Geolocation data may be different

The data returned for a given IP address may be different between the dataset versions, especially at the city level. While it's possible to migrate configurations by replacing the older geoip.* namespace with client.geo.*, we recommend you carefully review any business logic that may rely on this data, especially if it's implemented in VCL or if the values are exposed via HTTP headers or real-time streaming logs.

In particular, understand that:

The IP geolocation datasets are sourced from different vendors, each with different conventions for textual values. For example, client.geo.city and client.geo.country_name in the new dataset exist as lowercase ASCII values whereas the values returned for the same fields in older dataset are mixed case.
The client.geo.region field contains ISO 3166-2 region codes but the geoip.region field contains FIPS 10-4 region codes. The FIPS 10-4 standard was withdrawn in 2014.