AWS Global Accelerator Explained: Faster, Smarter Routing for Modern Applications

Introduction

In today’s always-connected world, delivering applications and services at peak performance can be a serious challenge—especially when catering to a global user base. Latency, network congestion, and unpredictable internet pathways can dramatically degrade user experience, resulting in sluggish load times and potential service interruptions.

That’s where AWS Global Accelerator comes in. This fully managed networking service taps into the vast AWS global infrastructure to route traffic efficiently and reduce latency for customers across different regions. Whether you’re running an e-commerce platform with users around the globe or hosting a real-time gaming application that demands ultra-low latency, AWS Global Accelerator can help keep your application fast, responsive, and highly available.

In this blog, we’ll explore how AWS Global Accelerator works, its various components, and the typical use cases where it shines. We’ll also delve into key benefits such as static IP provisioning, real-time health checks, and a reliable fallback mechanism that ensures your users always connect to the healthiest endpoints. Let’s dive in and discover how to supercharge your applications with the power of AWS’s high-performance backbone network.

What is AWS Global Accelerator?

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service designed to enhance the availability and performance of applications for global users by intelligently routing traffic through Amazon Web Services’ extensive global infrastructure.

Leveraging the AWS global network, it directs user traffic to the closest and most optimal endpoint based on real-time health checks and geographic proximity. This minimizes internet latency, boosts transfer speeds, and improves application reliability, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Since the public internet can be unpredictable and congested, AWS states that using their private infrastructure can enhance connection speed, reduce latency, and improve overall application performance by up to 60%.

AWS Global Accelerator Types

To enhance the performance of your applications for clients (i.e., users), AWS Global Accelerator offers two types of accelerators based on your application’s requirements.

Standard Accelerator

This type improves the availability and performance of applications running on Application Load Balancers (ALB), Network Load Balancers (NLB), or Amazon EC2 instances. It routes client traffic across regional endpoints based on geographic proximity and endpoint health. Additionally, it allows users to control traffic distribution across endpoints using traffic dials and endpoint weights, enabling seamless traffic management and failover. This is applicable to a wide range of use cases, including blue/green deployments, A/B testing, and multi-region deployments.

Custom Routing Accelerator

A custom routing accelerator enables you to use your own application logic to route traffic directly to a specific Amazon EC2 instance. In contrast, a standard AWS Global Accelerator automatically directs traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint, giving you no control over which EC2 instance serves the request. This can be an issue if, for example, you have applications in different languages running on separate instances.

To address this, a Custom Routing Accelerator allows you to assign specific ports that map directly to designated EC2 instances. These instances operate across AWS’s global edge infrastructure, meaning you benefit from AWS’s high-performance network while maintaining fine-grained control over traffic distribution, ensuring users are directed to the appropriate instance. Note that, in a Custom Routing Accelerator, the endpoints are not individual EC2 instances but rather subnets within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), where traffic is forwarded to specific instances based on port mappings.

One example for using Custom Routing Accelerators, is VoIP applications, which assign multiple callers to a specific media server to initiate voice, video, and messaging sessions. Another example is online gaming applications, where players are assigned to a single session on a game server based on factors like geographic location, player skill, and more.

AWS Global Accelerator Key Components

Static IP Addresses

By default, AWS Global Accelerator provides you with static IP addresses that you associate with your accelerator. These static IPs are Anycast from the AWS edge network, ensuring low-latency and highly available routing.

• For IPv4, Global Accelerator assigns two static IPv4 addresses.
• For dual-stack, it provides four addresses: two static IPv4 addresses and two static IPv6 addresses.

Additionally, for IPv4, instead of using the default IP addresses provided by Global Accelerator, you have the option to use your own IP address ranges through the Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) feature. This allows you to retain existing IP addresses while leveraging AWS’s global network infrastructure.

The static IP addresses assigned to your accelerator remain linked to it for as long as the accelerator exists, even if you disable the accelerator and it no longer accepts or routes traffic. However, if you delete the accelerator, you will lose the static IP addresses associated with it. Once deleted, those IP addresses are no longer available for routing traffic.

Accelerator

An accelerator routes traffic to endpoints via the AWS global network, enhancing the performance of your internet applications. Each accelerator consists of one or more listeners to manage the traffic flow. There are two types of AWS GA Accelerators: Standard Accelerator and Custom Routing Accelerator.

DNS Name

Global Accelerator provides each accelerator with a default Domain Name System (DNS) name, such as a1234567890abcdef.awsglobalaccelerator.com, which points to the static IP addresses assigned to you or those you’ve chosen from your own IP address range.

If you are using a dual-stack accelerator, Global Accelerator also assigns a dual-stack DNS name, like a1234567890abcdef.dualstack.awsglobalaccelerator.com, which resolves to the four static IP addresses associated with your dual-stack accelerator.

Depending on your specific use case, you can route traffic using either the accelerator’s static IP addresses or its DNS name. Additionally, you can configure DNS records to route traffic through your own custom domain name.

Network Zone

A network zone is similar to an AWS Availability Zone in that it is an isolated unit with its own set of physical infrastructure. When you create an accelerator, Global Accelerator assigns a set of static IP addresses: two static IPv4 addresses for an accelerator with an IPv4 IP address type, or four static IP addresses for a dual-stack accelerator (both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses).

Global Accelerator serves one static IP address per network zone from a unique IP subnet for each IP address family. If an address from a network zone becomes unavailable, due to factors like IP address blocking by certain client networks or network disruptions, client applications can automatically retry and connect to the healthy static IP address from the other isolated network zone.

Listener

A listener handles inbound connections from clients to Global Accelerator, based on the port (or port range) and protocol (or protocols) you configure. It can be set up to handle TCP, UDP, or both TCP and UDP protocols. Each listener is associated with one or more endpoint groups, and traffic is forwarded to the endpoints within these groups.

You associate endpoint groups with listeners by specifying the regions where you want traffic to be distributed. With a standard accelerator, traffic is intelligently routed to the most optimal endpoints within the associated endpoint groups, ensuring efficient distribution.

Endpoint Group

An endpoint group is linked to a specific AWS Region and contains one or more endpoints within that region. For a standard accelerator, you have the flexibility to adjust the traffic dial, which controls the percentage of traffic directed to an endpoint group. This feature allows you to easily perform tasks like performance testing or blue/green deployment testing, such as testing new releases across multiple AWS regions.

Endpoint

An endpoint is the destination that Global Accelerator directs traffic to.

For standard accelerators, endpoints can be Network Load Balancers(NLB), Application Load Balancers(ALB), EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses(EIP). An ALB endpoint can be either internet-facing or internal. Traffic for standard accelerators is routed to endpoints based on their health and configurable settings, such as endpoint weights. You can assign weights to each endpoint, which define the proportion of traffic to be routed to that particular endpoint. This feature is especially useful for performance testing within a region.

For custom routing accelerators, endpoints are Amazon VPC subnets, which include one or more Amazon EC2 instances as the traffic destinations.

For more information, read the official documentation about the AWS GA components.

How AWS Global Accelerator Works

1. User Initiates a Request: When a user sends a request, it is directed to one of AWS Global Accelerator’s static IP addresses, which act as a consistent entry point for the application.
2. Traffic Routing: AWS Global Accelerator processes the incoming request using the AWS global network. It evaluates the health status and geographic proximity of the closest application endpoints to determine the most optimal route for the traffic.
3. Endpoint Selection: The service selects the most optimal endpoint from a range of configured options, including Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, or EC2 instances located across multiple AWS Regions. This selection is based on factors such as the health of the endpoint and its proximity to the user, ensuring minimized latency.
4. Request Handling and Response: Once the endpoint processes the user request, the response is sent back through the Global Accelerator, ensuring an optimized delivery path for enhanced speed and reliability.

AWS Global Accelerator Use Cases

Scaling for Increased Application Utilization

As application usage increases, the number of IP addresses and endpoints you need to manage also grows. AWS Global Accelerator allows you to scale your network effortlessly, up or down. It enables you to associate regional resources, such as load balancers and Amazon EC2 instances, with two static IPv4 addresses, or with two IPv4 and two IPv6 addresses for a dual-stack configuration. You only need to include these addresses in the allow lists once, in your client applications, firewalls, and DNS records. With Global Accelerator, you can easily add or remove endpoints across AWS Regions, perform blue/green deployments, and conduct A/B testing, all without needing to update IP addresses in your client applications. This is particularly valuable in industries like IoT, retail, media, automotive, and healthcare, where frequent updates to client applications are not feasible.

Acceleration for Latency-Sensitive Applications

Many applications, particularly in gaming, media and finance, require ultra-low latency for optimal user experiences. AWS Global Accelerator enhances this by directing user traffic to the nearest application endpoint, reducing internet latency and jitter. Using Anycast, Global Accelerator routes traffic to the closest Edge Location, and then directs it to the most optimal regional endpoint over the AWS global network. Additionally, Global Accelerator quickly adapts to changes in network performance, ensuring consistent improvements in application performance for your users.

Disaster Recovery and Multi-Region Resiliency

Your network’s reliability is crucial for maintaining application availability. You may deploy your application across multiple AWS Regions to enhance disaster recovery, ensure higher availability, reduce latency, or meet compliance requirements. If Global Accelerator detects a failure at your primary AWS Region’s application endpoint, it promptly reroutes traffic to the next closest available endpoint in a different AWS Region, ensuring minimal disruption and continued service.

For more information, read the official documentation of AWS GA use cases.

Get Started with AWS Global Accelerator

To get started with AWS Global Accelerator, follow these steps:

1. Choose Accelerator Type: Decide between a standard accelerator or a custom routing accelerator.
2. Configure Initial Setup: Provide a name, choose the accelerator type, and select the address type.
3. Configure Listeners: Define inbound connection settings based on the protocol and port.
4. Set Up Regional Endpoint Groups: Add regional endpoint groups to your listener and configure traffic settings.
5. Add Endpoints: Choose endpoints for the accelerator (load balancers, EC2 instances, or VPC subnets).

For detailed steps, visit the official guide.

AWS Global Accelerator Pricing

AWS Global Accelerator pricing is based on two factors: the number of accelerators you deploy and the volume of data transferred. You pay a fixed hourly fee for each accelerator, which includes AWS-provided static IP addresses. Data transfer costs are based on the amount of data processed, and the pricing varies depending on the geographic region. For more details, you can refer to the official AWS Global Accelerator pricing page.

AWS Global Accelerator VS AWS CloudFront

Some users may confuse AWS Global Accelerator and AWS CloudFront, as both services enhance performance and availability for applications running on AWS. However, they serve different purposes.

Global Accelerator is designed for improving application performance by routing traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint, providing low-latency, and high-availability for global applications. It is ideal for real-time traffic and applications requiring fast response times. CloudFront, on the other hand, is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches and delivers static and dynamic content to end users from the nearest edge location. While Global Accelerator is more focused on application traffic, CloudFront optimizes content delivery.

To learn more about Amazon CloudFront and how it enhances web performance, check out our blog post: Amazon CloudFront Explained.

Optimize Your AWS Costs with Cloudchipr

While AWS Global Accelerator helps optimize traffic routing for better application performance, you still need a robust solution to manage overall cloud infrastructure efficiently and keep costs under control. Cloudchipr offers multi-cloud management and cost optimization features that empower organizations to strike the perfect balance of performance, scalability, and budget across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Key Features of Cloudchipr

‍Automated Resource Management:‍

Identify and eliminate idle or underutilized resources through no-code automation workflows. This reduces wasteful spending and streamlines cloud usage.‍

Rightsizing Recommendations:

Receive data-driven suggestions for optimal instance sizes, storage choices, and compute resources. This ensures that you get the performance you need without overspending.

Commitments Tracking:

Monitor your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans to maximize their utilization. Avoid unnecessary expenses by gaining clear visibility into your commitments.

Live Usage & Management:

Track real-time resource consumption and analyze performance metrics across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Quickly spot inefficiencies and maintain tighter operational control.

Try Cloudchipr Risk-Free

Experience the full power of Cloudchipr with a 14-day free trial—no obligations, no hidden fees. Discover how effective multi-cloud management and cost optimization can be when combined with AWS Global Accelerator for a truly high-performance and cost-efficient cloud environment.

Conclusion

AWS Global Accelerator is a powerful networking service designed to optimize application performance, reliability, and availability for users worldwide. By leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure, it minimizes latency, improves traffic routing, and ensures seamless failover, making it an ideal solution for applications requiring high availability and low-latency access.

Whether you choose a Standard Accelerator for intelligent traffic distribution across multiple AWS regions or a Custom Routing Accelerator for fine-grained control over endpoint selection, AWS Global Accelerator provides significant advantages over traditional public internet routing.

By incorporating static IP addresses, endpoint health monitoring, and AWS’s private backbone network, businesses can achieve faster response times, enhanced fault tolerance, and improved user experience, all while simplifying network management.

If you’re looking to enhance the speed and reliability of your global applications, AWS Global Accelerator is an excellent choice to consider.