What is AWS Global Accelerator?

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that improves the availability and performance of the applications that you offer to your global users.

Today, if you deliver applications to your global users over the public internet, your users might face inconsistent availability and performance as they traverse through multiple public networks to reach your application. These public networks can be congested and each hop can introduce availability and performance risk. AWS Global Accelerator uses the highly available and congestion-free AWS global network to direct internet traffic from your users to your applications on AWS, making your users’ experience more consistent.

To improve the availability of your application, you must monitor the health of your application endpoints and route traffic only to healthy endpoints. AWS Global Accelerator improves application availability by continuously monitoring the health of your application endpoints and routing traffic to the closest healthy endpoints.

AWS Global Accelerator also makes it easier to manage your global applications by providing static IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point to your application hosted on AWS which eliminates the complexity of managing specific IP addresses for different AWS Regions and Availability Zones. AWS Global Accelerator is easy to set up, configure and manage.

Benefits

• Improve global application availability
  AWS Global Accelerator continually monitors the health of your application endpoints, such as your Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, or Elastic IPs, instantly reacting to changes in their health or configuration. AWS Global Accelerator will then redirect user traffic to healthy endpoints that deliver the best performance and availability to your users.
• Accelerate your global applications
  AWS Global Accelerator optimizes the network path, taking advantage of the vast, congestion-free AWS global network. Regardless of where your users are located, AWS Global Accelerator intelligently routes traffic to the endpoint that provides the best application performance.
• Easily manage endpoints
  AWS Global Accelerator’s static IP addresses make it easy to move endpoints between Availability Zones or AWS Regions without needing to update your DNS configuration or change client-facing applications.

Use cases

• Scale for increased application utilization
  When application usage grows, the number of IP addresses and endpoints that you need to manage also increase. AWS Global Accelerator allows you to scale your network up or down. AWS Global Accelerator lets you associate regional resources, such as load balancers and EC2 instances, to two static IP addresses. You only whitelist these addresses once in your client applications, firewalls, and DNS records. With AWS Global Accelerator, you can add or remove endpoints in the AWS Regions, run blue/green deployment, and A/B test without needing to update the IP addresses in your client applications. This is particularly useful for IoT, retail, media, automotive and healthcare use cases in which client applications cannot be updated frequently.
• Accelerate latency-sensitive applications
  Many applications, such as gaming, media, mobile applications, and financial applications, need very low latency for a great user experience. To improve the user experience, AWS Global Accelerator directs user traffic to the nearest application endpoint to the client, thus reducing internet latency and jitter. It routes the traffic to the closest edge location via Anycast, then by routing it to the closest regional endpoint over the AWS global network. AWS Global Accelerator quickly reacts to changes in network performance to improve your users’ application performance.
• Disaster recovery and multi-region resiliency
  You need to rely on your network to always be available. You might be running your application across multiple AWS Regions for disaster recovery, higher availability, lower latency, or compliance. If AWS Global Accelerator detects failure of your application endpoint in the primary AWS Region, it instantly triggers traffic re-routing to your application endpoint in the next available, closest endpoint AWS Region.
• Origin Cloaking
  When making your Application Load Balancers internet-facing to serve your end users, you also increase your exposure to attacks from the internet. AWS Global Accelerator allows you to add an internal Application Load Balancer as an endpoint. By using AWS Global Accelerator as the single internet-facing access point, you protect your applications running on AWS from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and control how your end users reach your applications. AWS Global Accelerator creates a peering connection between the AWS Global Accelerator and your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). The traffic between the two VPCs uses private IP addresses.

How it works

Directly access web applications

• Without AWS Global Accelerator
  
  It can take many networks to reach the application. Paths to and from the application may differ. Each hop impacts performance and can introduce risks.
• With AWS Global Accelerator
  

  Adding AWS Global Accelerator removes these inefficiencies. It leverages the Global AWS Network, resulting in improved performance.

Tutorials on AWS Global Accelerator: