What is AWS Global Accelerator?
AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that sends your user's traffic through AWS's global network infrastructure, improving internet user performance by up to 60%.
Key Concepts
1. Static IP Addresses
- Provides you with two static IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point to your application, hosted in multiple regions.
- Great for whitelisting in corporate firewalls.
2. The AWS Global Network
- Instead of traffic bouncing over the public internet (which is unreliable), it enters the AWS network at the Edge Location closest to the user and rides the dedicated AWS fiber backbone to your application.
Exam Tips
[!IMPORTANT] CloudFront vs Global Accelerator:
- CloudFront: Caching content (Images, Videos, Static Sites). HTTP/HTTPS.
- Global Accelerator: Improving Network Performance (TCP/UDP) and fast regional failover. No caching.
[!NOTE] Failover: Automatically reroutes traffic to a healthy secondary region in seconds if the primary region goes down.
Common Use Cases
- Blue/Green Deployment: Easily shift traffic between different stacks just by changing weights.
- Gaming: Low latency UDP traffic for multiplayer games.