Turbocharge Your Application’s Performance with AWS Global Accelerator

Introduction

In today’s interconnected world, users expect applications to be fast, responsive, and available 24/7, no matter where they are. But the public internet, with its unpredictable routes and potential for congestion, can be a major roadblock to delivering a seamless global user experience.

That’s where AWS Global Accelerator comes in.

The Problem with Traditional Routing

Think about a user in London trying to access an application hosted in an AWS Region in Virginia. The data has to travel across the public internet, hopping from network to network. This journey is often inefficient, with traffic taking non-optimal paths, leading to increased latency, jitter, and potential for packet loss. These factors translate directly into a sluggish user experience, especially for latency-sensitive applications like gaming, real-time communications, or financial trading.

How AWS Global Accelerator Changes the Game

AWS Global Accelerator addresses this challenge by providing two static anycast IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point to your application. When a user tries to access your application, their request is automatically routed to the closest AWS edge location. From there, the traffic is intelligently routed over the AWS global network to the nearest healthy application endpoint.

AWS Global Accelerator features – Amazon Web Services

Here’s why this is so effective:

• Static Anycast IP Addresses: Unlike traditional DNS-based routing, which can be slow to propagate changes, Global Accelerator provides static IP addresses that you can use in your application’s DNS. This gives you a consistent, fixed entry point for your users.
• Leveraging the AWS Global Network: The AWS global network is a highly optimized, congestion-free backbone that connects AWS Regions and edge locations worldwide. By routing traffic over this private network, Global Accelerator significantly reduces first-byte latency, jitter, and improves throughput.
• Instant Failover and High Availability: Global Accelerator continuously monitors the health of your application endpoints. If an endpoint becomes unhealthy, it instantly reroutes traffic to the next closest healthy endpoint, ensuring your application remains available and responsive without any user intervention.
• Deterministic Routing: With Global Accelerator, you can achieve deterministic routing, which means you have more control over how traffic is distributed. You can even use features like “traffic dials” to control the percentage of traffic sent to each regional endpoint group, enabling you to perform blue/green deployments or A/B testing with ease.
• DDoS Protection: By default, Global Accelerator is protected by AWS Shield Standard, which helps mitigate DDoS attacks closer to the source, adding another layer of security to your applications.

When to Use AWS Global Accelerator

While many services can help with content delivery, Global Accelerator shines in specific use cases, including:

• Non-HTTP Applications: If you’re running applications that use TCP or UDP protocols, such as gaming, IoT, or Voice over IP (VoIP), Global Accelerator is a perfect fit. Traditional CDNs are often designed for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, making them unsuitable for these use cases.
• Mission-Critical Applications: For applications where high availability and fast failover are paramount, such as financial trading platforms or disaster recovery scenarios, Global Accelerator provides the reliability you need. Its ability to instantly reroute traffic ensures minimal downtime.
• Applications with Global Users: If your user base is spread across the globe and you want to ensure a consistently high-performance experience, Global Accelerator is a powerful tool to have in your arsenal. It evens out the performance differences that can exist due to geographic distance.

Improve Web Performance with AWS Global Accelerator – AWS

• Simplifying IP Management: If you need to simplify your network architecture by having static IP addresses that don’t change, even if you move your endpoints between Availability Zones or Regions, Global Accelerator is the answer.

Global Accelerator vs. Amazon CloudFront: What's the Difference?

A common point of confusion is how Global Accelerator compares to Amazon CloudFront, another AWS service designed for global performance. While both use the AWS global network, they serve different purposes.

• Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Its primary goal is to cache static and dynamic web content at edge locations to reduce latency for end-users. It’s optimized for delivering web pages, images, videos, and APIs, primarily over HTTP/HTTPS.
• AWS Global Accelerator is a network layer service. Its primary goal is to improve the availability and performance of your applications by optimizing the path for traffic from the user to your application endpoints. It works at the network layer (Layer 4) and supports both TCP and UDP protocols, making it suitable for a wider range of applications beyond web content.

Think of it this way: You  use Global Accelerator for your application’s dynamic traffic and CloudFront to serve static content.

Getting Started with AWS Global Accelerator

Setting up Global Accelerator is a straightforward process within the AWS Management Console.

1. Create an Accelerator: You start by creating a new accelerator and specifying a name for it.
2. Configure Listeners: You then configure one or more “listeners,” which are the ports and protocols (TCP or UDP) that your accelerator will listen for traffic on.
3. Define Endpoint Groups: Next, you define “endpoint groups” for each AWS Region where your application endpoints are located. You can also specify a traffic dial to control the percentage of traffic sent to each group.
4. Add Endpoints: Finally, you add your application endpoints (such as Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, or EC2 instances with Elastic IP addresses) to the appropriate endpoint groups.

Once configured, Global Accelerator provides you with two static IP addresses that you can use in your DNS records. Your users will then be routed to your application via the highly optimized AWS global network.

In conclusion, AWS Global Accelerator is a game-changer for businesses that want to deliver a superior application experience to their global user base. By intelligently routing traffic over the fast and reliable AWS global network, it helps you improve performance, increase availability, and simplify network management, allowing you to focus on building great applications. To learn more on AWS Click here and start your journey

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