AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that sends your user’s traffic through Amazon Web Service’s global network infrastructure, improving your internet user performance by up to 60%.

When the internet is congested, Global Accelerator’s automatic routing optimizations will help keep your packet loss, jitter, and latency consistently low.

With Global Accelerator, you are provided two global static customer facing IPs to simplify traffic management.

On the back end, add or remove your AWS application origins, such as Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, Elastic IPs, and EC2 Instances, without making user facing changes.

To mitigate endpoint failure, Global Accelerator automatically re-routes your traffic to your nearest healthy available endpoint.

Global Accelerator continuously monitors the health of all endpoints, and instantly begins directing traffic to another available endpoint when it determines that an active endpoint is unhealthy. This allows you to create a high-availability architecture for your applications on AWS.

Create accelerators to improve availability and performance of your applications for local and global users.

Global Accelerator directs traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network.

Global Accelerator is a global service that supports endpoints in multiple AWS Regions, which are listed in the AWS Region Table.

The static IP addresses are anycast from the AWS edge network and distribute incoming application traffic across multiple endpoint resources in multiple AWS Regions, which increases the availability of your applications.

The static IP addresses remain assigned to your accelerator for as long as it exists, even if you disable the accelerator and it no longer accepts or routes traffic. However, when you delete an accelerator, you lose the static IP addresses that are assigned to it, so you can no longer route traffic by using them.

You can use IAM policies with Global Accelerator, for example, tag-based permissions, to limit the users who have permissions to delete an accelerator.

Global accelerator simulator: https://speedtest.globalaccelerator.aws/#/

Static IP addresses: Global Accelerator provides you with a set of two static IP addresses that are anycast from the AWS edge network. If you bring your own IP address range to AWS (BYOIP), you can instead assign IP addresses from your own pool to use with your accelerator.

Accelerator: An accelerator directs traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network to improve the availability and performance of your internet applications. Each accelerator includes one or more listeners.

DNS name: Global Accelerator assigns each accelerator a default Domain Name System (DNS) name, similar to a1234567890abcdef.awsglobalaccelerator.com, that points to the static IP addresses that Global Accelerator assigns to you or that you choose from your own IP address range.

Network zone: A network zone services the static IP addresses for your accelerator from a unique IP subnet. Similar to an AWS Availability Zone, a network zone is an isolated unit with its own set of physical infrastructure. When you configure an accelerator, by default, Global Accelerator allocates two IPv4 addresses for it.

Listener: A listener processes inbound connections from clients to Global Accelerator, based on the port (or port range) and protocol that you configure. Global Accelerator supports both TCP and UDP protocols. Each listener has one or more endpoint groups associated with it, and traffic is forwarded to endpoints in one of the groups. You associate endpoint groups with listeners by specifying the Regions that you want to distribute traffic to. Traffic is distributed to optimal endpoints within the endpoint groups associated with a listener.

Endpoint group: Each endpoint group is associated with a specific AWS Region. Endpoint groups include one or more endpoints in the Region. You can increase or reduce the percentage of traffic that would be otherwise directed to an endpoint group by adjusting a setting called a traffic dial. The traffic dial lets you easily do performance testing or blue/green deployment testing, for example, for new releases across different AWS Regions.

Endpoint: Endpoints can be NLB, ALB, EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses. An ALB endpoint can be an internet-facing or internal. Traffic is routed to endpoints based on configuration options that you choose, such as endpoint weights. For each endpoint, you can configure weights, which are numbers that you can use to specify the proportion of traffic to route to each one. This can be useful, for example, to do performance testing within a Region.

Scale for increased application utilization: Global Accelerator enables you to scale your network up or down. It lets you associate regional resources, such as load balancers and EC2 instances, to two static IP addresses. You include these addresses on allow lists just once in your client applications, firewalls, and DNS records. With Global Accelerator, you can add or remove endpoints in AWS Regions, run blue/green deployment, and do A/B testing without having to update the IP addresses in your client applications. This is particularly useful for IoT, retail, media, automotive, and healthcare use cases in which you can't easily update client applications frequently.

Acceleration for latency-sensitive applications: Many applications, especially in areas such as gaming, media, mobile apps, and financials, require very low latency for a great user experience. To improve the user experience, Global Accelerator directs user traffic to the application endpoint that is nearest to the client, which reduces internet latency and jitter.

Disaster recovery and multi-region resiliency: If Global Accelerator detects that your application endpoint is failing in the primary AWS Region, it instantly triggers traffic re-routing to your application endpoint in the next available, closest AWS Region.

Protect your applications: You can help mitigate this risk by using AWS Global Accelerator. First, add an internal Application Load Balancer or a private EC2 instance as an endpoint in Global Accelerator. Then you can use Global Accelerator as the single internet-facing access point for the endpoint. This reduces the risk of (DDoS) attacks and controls how your users reach your applications. Global Accelerator creates a peering connection between your accelerator’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and your Amazon VPC. The traffic between the two VPCs uses private IP addresses.

With AWS Global Accelerator, you pay only for what you use. You are charged an hourly rate and data transfer costs for each accelerator in your account.

Example Global Accelerator