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.
