AWS Global Accelerator

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that improves an application's availability and performance by directing traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network.

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What is AWS Global Accelerator

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AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed to improve the availability and performance of the applications that you offer to your global users. This service leverages the Amazon global network, allowing users to route their traffic through AWS's vast, highly available, and congestion-free backbone. By doing so, it helps in minimizing the path length between your users and your applications endpoint, regardless of where your users might be located globally. This results in a noticeable improvement in the user experience through reduced latency and packet loss.

The way AWS Global Accelerator works is fairly straightforward but profoundly impactful. When a user tries to access your application, Global Accelerator routes the user's request to the nearest edge location and then travels through AWS's network directly to the nearest application endpoint whether the application is deployed in one or more AWS Regions. This is significantly more efficient than routing over the public internet, where traffic is subject to various conditions that can lead to unpredictable performance and higher latency.

Another key aspect of AWS Global Accelerator is its support for static IP addresses that are globally unique and fixed, unlike the dynamic IP addresses typically assigned which can change and cause disruptions or require DNS updates. By providing static IP addresses, AWS makes it easier to manage applications without the need to update DNS settings frequently, adding an extra layer of reliability for applications that require a stable endpoint.

Global Accelerator also offers health checks and automatic failover. It continuously monitors the health of your application endpoints and can automatically reroute the traffic to healthy endpoints in case of failures. This feature ensures that your application remains available even if some of its endpoints become unhealthy, thus providing a robust solution to maintain high availability.

Security is another area where AWS Global Accelerator shines. It integrates with AWS Shield Standard, providing automatic protection against common network and transport layer DDoS attacks. This integrated protection helps in safeguarding applications from malicious attacks that could potentially disrupt service availability.

In essence, AWS Global Accelerator is a powerful tool for businesses looking to offer a seamless, high-performance experience to their customers around the globe. By leveraging AWSâs extensive and reliable infrastructure, it not only improves application performance but also enhances availability and security, making it an essential component of a global application delivery strategy.

Key AWS Global Accelerator Features

AWS Global Accelerator improves application performance by up to 60% through optimized paths, simplifies operational complexity by providing a single global entry point, enhances availability by routing to the nearest healthy end point, offers built-in DDoS protection, and aids in cost management by optimizing regional traffic serving.

Improved Performance

AWS Global Accelerator optimizes the path to your application to improve the performance of your internet applications by up to 60%. It directs traffic through Amazon Web Services' global network infrastructure, enhancing internet traffic routing.

Simplified Operations

By providing a global fixed entry point to your applications, AWS Global Accelerator simplifies how you manage global traffic, eliminating the need to manage IP addresses for different regions and reducing the operational complexity.

Increased Availability

AWS Global Accelerator improves the availability of your application by automatically routing traffic to the nearest healthy regional endpoint. This ensures a seamless experience for your users, even in the event of a regional failure.

Built-in Protection

It comes with built-in protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, ensuring that your applications remain available and perform well, even when they are targeted by malicious attempts to disrupt service.

Cost Control

AWS Global Accelerator allows you to optimize costs by controlling how traffic is served from different AWS regions, ensuring you can manage your expenses effectively without compromising on performance or availability.

AWS Global Accelerator Use Cases

AWS Global Accelerator use cases include improving global application performance, simplifying load balancing at scale, providing seamless IP address management, and enhancing application security and DDoS protection.

Improve Global Application Performance

AWS Global Accelerator improves the performance of your applications by routing user traffic through AWS's global network infrastructure. By deploying their application endpoints closer to users around the world, developers can reduce internet latency and improve data transfer speeds, offering a more seamless and responsive user experience.

Simplify Load Balancing at Scale

AWS Global Accelerator simplifies the management of load balancing across multiple regions. By automatically rerouting traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint, it enhances the availability and fault tolerance of your applications. This makes it easier for businesses to scale globally without the complexity of managing multiple load balancers or DNS configurations.

Seamless IP Address Management

By providing static IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point to your applications hosted in one or multiple AWS regions, AWS Global Accelerator simplifies IP address management. This allows organizations to avoid the complications associated with IP address changes in their applications, making it easier to whitelist IPs, manage firewall rules, and ensure consistent access for users and partners.

Enhanced Security and DDoS Protection

AWS Global Accelerator enhances application security by integrating with AWS Shield, a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service. This integration helps protect your applications from common web exploits and DDoS attacks, ensuring they remain available and secure.

AWS Global Accelerator pricing models

AWS Global Accelerator pricing consists of a fixed monthly fee per accelerator plus additional charges based on the amount of data transferred.

Fixed Monthly Fee

In addition to the traffic-based pricing, AWS Global Accelerator also charges a fixed monthly fee for each accelerator that you deploy. This fee is charged regardless of the amount of data transferred, providing a stable monthly cost for the use of the service.

Traffic-based Pricing

AWS Global Accelerator charges based on the volume of data transferred over the network that is directed to an endpoint. This includes the data transfer fees for all the AWS Regions that your Accelerator uses. Charges are calculated based on the amount of data, in gigabytes (GB), that flows from the Accelerator to the user or from the user to the Accelerator.

Services AWS Global Accelerator integrates with

AWS CloudFormation

AWS Global Accelerator integrates with AWS CloudFormation, allowing you to use CloudFormation templates to deploy and manage Global Accelerator resources such as accelerators, listeners, and endpoint groups.

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Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

AWS Global Accelerator integrates with Elastic Load Balancing to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, in multiple AWS regions.

Open Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) →

Amazon Route 53

AWS Global Accelerator integrates with Amazon Route 53 by automatically updating DNS records once an accelerator is deployed, ensuring traffic is routed to the optimal endpoints.

Open Amazon Route 53 →