AWS Global Accelerator is a service that utilizes the AWS global network to improve the availability and performance of applications that are accessed by a global audience. It provides a single static IP address that can be used to access applications hosted in multiple AWS Regions, which increases the availability of applications and reduces latency for end users.

One of the main features of AWS Global Accelerator is traffic steering, which enables traffic to be directed to optimal AWS endpoints based on health, geography, and routing policies. This helps ensure that end users are directed to the closest and healthiest endpoint, resulting in improved performance and availability of applications.

Another key benefit of AWS Global Accelerator is the ability to use client affinity. This feature ensures that a user’s session is always directed to the same endpoint, which is particularly useful for applications that require session continuity, such as gaming or financial services.

Overall, AWS Global Accelerator is an essential tool for organizations that require a high degree of availability and performance for their applications, particularly for those with a global user base.

Overview

What is AWS Global Accelerator?

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that enables organizations to improve the availability and performance of their applications. It uses the AWS global network to route traffic over the most optimal path from the end user to the application. This helps to improve the performance of the application, reduce latency and increase the availability of the application.

AWS Global Accelerator is designed to work with any application hosted in AWS or on-premises. It provides a fixed entry point (an Anycast IP address) for applications that can be used across multiple AWS regions, which helps in reducing the complexity of managing multiple IP addresses.

Benefits of using AWS Global Accelerator

The following are some of the benefits of using AWS Global Accelerator:

  1. Improved Application Performance: AWS Global Accelerator helps to improve application performance by routing traffic over the AWS global network, which reduces latency and improves the availability of the application.
  2. High Availability: AWS Global Accelerator provides a fixed entry point to applications that can be used across multiple AWS regions, which helps in reducing the complexity of managing multiple IP addresses. This ensures that applications are highly available and can withstand failures of individual instances or regions.
  3. Simplified Network Management: AWS Global Accelerator simplifies network management by providing a single entry point for applications that can be used across multiple AWS regions. This eliminates the need for managing multiple IP addresses and simplifies the process of deploying applications.
  4. Cost-effective: AWS Global Accelerator is a cost-effective solution that helps organizations to reduce costs associated with deploying and managing high-performance applications. It helps to optimize the use of resources and reduce the need for expensive infrastructure.

How it Works

AWS Global Accelerator Routing

AWS Global Accelerator routes traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network based on health, geography, and routing policies. Traffic is first directed to the optimal AWS edge location for the user, and then routed to the endpoint group closest to the user based on health and other factors. AWS Global Accelerator uses Anycast to direct traffic to the optimal endpoint group, ensuring that traffic is always directed to the closest, most available endpoint group.

Origin Configurations

AWS Global Accelerator supports multiple origin configurations, including IP addresses, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon EC2 instances. Each origin configuration can be associated with a specific endpoint group, allowing traffic to be directed to the optimal endpoint based on the origin configuration.

Endpoint Groups

Endpoint groups are a collection of endpoints that can receive traffic from AWS Global Accelerator. Each endpoint group can contain one or more endpoints, such as EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, or IP addresses. Endpoint groups can be associated with specific origin configurations and routing policies to ensure that traffic is directed to the optimal endpoint based on health, geography, and other factors.

Here are the expanded explanations for the features mentioned:

  1. Accelerated routing:
    Accelerated routing is a feature that enables faster and more efficient communication between different resources within a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) or between different VPCs. It uses Amazon’s own network infrastructure to provide optimized routing paths for better performance and reduced latency.
  2. Fault tolerance:
    Fault tolerance is a critical feature in AWS that ensures that your applications and services continue to function even when there are hardware or software failures. AWS provides multiple features such as Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and Multi-AZ (Availability Zones) deployments to ensure high availability and fault tolerance of your applications.
  3. Health checks:
    Health checks are a feature that allows you to monitor the health of your resources such as EC2 instances, load balancers, and databases. You can configure health checks to automatically detect and recover from any unhealthy resources, ensuring the availability and reliability of your applications.
  4. Flow logs:
    Flow logs are a feature that enables you to capture and log network traffic data for your VPC. You can use flow logs to troubleshoot and diagnose issues related to network connectivity, security, and performance. Flow logs can also be used for compliance and auditing purposes.
  5. Custom routing:
    Custom routing is a feature that allows you to create and manage your own routing tables for your VPC. You can use custom routing to define specific routing paths for your traffic, such as routing traffic through a specific VPN connection or a direct connect link. This feature provides greater control over the routing of your traffic and enables you to build more complex network architectures within your VPC.

Use Cases

Multi-region applications

AWS Cloud provides a variety of solutions to design, deploy, and manage multi-region applications. Multi-region architecture helps in improving the availability and performance of applications by replicating data across regions. With AWS Cloud, you can create and manage multi-region architectures using services like Amazon Route 53, AWS Global Accelerator, and Amazon S3 cross-region replication.

Disaster recovery

AWS Cloud provides comprehensive solutions for disaster recovery (DR) that help you minimize downtime and data loss. You can use services like Amazon S3 for data backup and recovery, AWS Backup for automating backup and recovery tasks, and AWS CloudFormation for automating infrastructure deployment. With these solutions, you can ensure the availability of your applications even during a disaster.

High-traffic websites

High-traffic websites require scalable infrastructure that can handle sudden spikes in traffic. AWS Cloud provides a range of services that can help you build and manage scalable infrastructure, including Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53. With these services, you can ensure that your website remains available and responsive even during high traffic periods.

Gaming applications

Gaming applications require low-latency infrastructure to provide a seamless user experience. AWS Cloud provides a range of services that can help you build and manage low-latency infrastructure, including Amazon GameLift, Amazon Elasticache for Redis, and Amazon DynamoDB. With these services, you can ensure that your gaming application remains responsive and provides an engaging user experience.

Pricing

AWS Global Accelerator is priced based on the number of accelerators deployed and the amount of traffic that is routed through them. There are no upfront fees or commitments, and customers only pay for the traffic that they route through the accelerators.

The pricing for AWS Global Accelerator consists of two components:

  1. Fixed hourly fee per accelerator deployed: This fee covers the cost of running the accelerator and is charged on an hourly basis for each accelerator deployed.
  2. Data transfer charges: This fee is based on the amount of traffic that is routed through the accelerator and is charged on a per-GB basis.

The pricing for AWS Global Accelerator varies based on the AWS Region in which the accelerator is deployed. Customers can use the AWS Global Accelerator pricing calculator to estimate their costs.

Cost optimization tips

To optimize the cost of AWS Global Accelerator, customers can consider the following tips:

  1. Use the AWS Global Accelerator only for critical applications that require improved performance and availability.
  2. Optimize the size of the accelerators based on the amount of traffic that is expected to be routed through them.
  3. Monitor the traffic usage and adjust the number of accelerators as needed to ensure optimal performance and cost efficiency.
  4. Configure the endpoint groups to route traffic to the most cost-effective and performant endpoints.
  5. Use AWS Cost Explorer to monitor the cost of AWS Global Accelerator and identify opportunities for cost optimization.

Getting Started

Step-by-step guide to setting up AWS Global Accelerator

Follow these steps to set up AWS Global Accelerator:

  1. Sign in to your AWS Management Console and navigate to the Global Accelerator service.
  2. Click “Create accelerator” and specify a name for your accelerator.
  3. Select the regions that you want to use for your accelerator.
  4. Configure your endpoint groups, which are the endpoint resources (such as EC2 instances or Elastic IP addresses) that you want to use with your accelerator.
  5. Specify a listener for your accelerator, which is the protocol and port that you want to use for incoming traffic.
  6. Associate your accelerator with a domain name.
  7. Test your accelerator to ensure that it is working correctly.

Best practices for using AWS Global Accelerator

Here are some best practices for using AWS Global Accelerator:

  1. Use multiple endpoint groups to distribute traffic across multiple regions or availability zones.
  2. Use health checks to monitor the health of your endpoint resources and automatically route traffic to healthy resources.
  3. Use Elastic IP addresses for your endpoint resources to ensure that your IP address remains the same even if you stop and start your instances.
  4. Use Route 53 to manage your DNS records and associate your domain name with your accelerator.
  5. Monitor your accelerator using CloudWatch metrics to ensure that it is performing as expected and make adjustments as necessary.

Conclusion

In summary, AWS Global Accelerator is a powerful service that provides a range of benefits to organizations seeking to improve their application performance and availability. By leveraging AWS’s global network, Global Accelerator can help organizations achieve faster, more reliable network connections, reduce latency and packet loss, and provide failover capabilities across multiple regions.

Some common use cases for AWS Global Accelerator include improving the performance of web applications, providing high-availability services to customers, and enabling disaster recovery and business continuity strategies. Organizations that have geographically dispersed customers or rely on multiple AWS regions can benefit greatly from Global Accelerator’s capabilities.

In conclusion, AWS Global Accelerator is a valuable addition to any organization’s AWS toolkit, providing a range of benefits and use cases that can help improve application performance and reliability. As more and more organizations move their applications to the cloud, Global Accelerator is sure to become an increasingly important component of many cloud architectures.