[AWS] Global Accelerator

Global Accelerator is a networking service that improves performance and availability by directing traffic to optional endpoints.

Global Accelerator associates the static IP addresses to regional AWS resources or endpoints, such as ELBs, ALBs, EC2 Instances, and Elastic IP addresses. The IP addresses are anycast from AWS edge locations, so they provide onboarding to the AWS global network close to your users.
It can easily move endpoints between AZs or regions without updating your DNS configuration or changing client-facing applications.
You can dial traffic up or down for a specific Region by configuring a traffic dial percentage for endpoint groups. This is useful for testing performance and releasing updates.
You can control the proportion of traffic directed to each endpoint within an endpoint group by assigning weights across the endpoints.
Global Accelerator monitors the health of endpoints within the endpoint group using the health check settings defined for each endpoint.

A Network Zone is an isolated unit of physical infrastructure. It provides 2 static IPs for high availability.
A Listener processes the inbound request based on the protocol (TCP or UDP) and the port. Each listener has a group of endpoints, to which the traffic is forwarded.
An Endpoint is a target; Load Balancer (Application or Network), EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses. An endpoint is in a group, and for each endpoint, weights (numbers to specify the proportion of traffic) can be configured.

Create an accelerator
- Global Accelerator provisions two static IP addresses.
Configure one or more listeners
- Listeners process inbound connections based on the protocol and port that you specify.
Configure endpoint groups
- Associate one or more regional endpoint groups to a listener by specifying the AWS Regions to which you want to distribute traffic.
- Your listener routes requests to the registered endpoints in this endpoint group.
Register endpoints for endpoint groups
- You register one or more regional resources, such as ALBs, NLBs, EC2 instances, and Elastics IPs, in each endpoint group.
- You can set weights to choose how much traffic is routed to each endpoint.

Global Accelerator provides static IP addresses that provide a fixed entry point to your applications and eliminate the complexity of managing specific IP addresses for different AWS Regions and Availability Zones.
It is used for applications that require very low latency, such as media, gaming, financial, and mobile apps.
It can react quickly to regional failover by route traffic to the next available endpoint.
High Availability: It quickly reacts to changes in network performance to improve users’ experience.

ELB provides load balancing within one region. Global Accelerator provides traffic management across multiple regions.
Use a regional ELB as a target for Global Accelerator.

Both services use the AWS global network and edge locations.
CloudFront is generally for HTTP(S) traffics for static content (images and videos) and dynamic content.
Global Accelerator works over TCP or UDP. It is good for gaming (UDP), IoT (MQTT – Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), or VoIP, or even HTTP use cases that specifically require static IP addresses or deterministic, fast regional failover.
Both services are integrated with AWS Shield for DDoS protection.

Published by Pyongwon Lee