Global Accelerator

AWS Global Accelerator is a service in which you create accelerators to improve availability and performance of your applications for local and global users. Global Accelerator directs traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network. This improves the availability and performance of your internet applications that are used by a global audience. By default, Global Accelerator provides you with 2 static IP addresses that you can associate with your accelerator, or you can bring your own.

Includes following components:

• Static IP addresses - Global Accelerator provides you with 2 IP addresses, or you can bring your own.

• Accelerator - directs traffic to optimal endpoints over AWS global network to improve the availability and performance of your web applications. Each accelerator includes one or more listeners.

• DNS name - Global Accelerator assigns each accelerator a default DNS name - similar to abcdefg123455z.awsglobalaccelerator.com - that points to the static IP addresses that Global Accelerator assigns to you. Depending on the use case, you can use your accelerator's static IP addresses or DNS name to route traffic to your accelerator, or setup DNS records to route traffic using your own custom domain name.

• Network Zone - A network zone services the static IP addresses for your accelerator from a unique IP subnet. Similar to AWS Availability Zone, a network zone is an isolated unit with its own set of physical infrastructure. When you configure accelerator, by default, Global Accelerator allocates 2 IPv4 addresses for it. If one IP address from a network zone becomes unavailable due to IP address blocking by certain client networks, or network disruptions, client applications can retry on the healthy static IP address from the other isolated network zone.

• Listener - A listener processes inbound connections from clients to Global Accelerator, based on the port (or port range) and protocol that you configure. Global Accelerator supports both TCP and UDP protocols. Each listener has one or more endpoint groups associated with it, and traffic is forwarded to endpoints in one of the groups. You associate endpoint groups with listeners by specifying the regions that you want to distribute traffic to. Traffic is distributed to optimal endpoints within the endpoint groups associated with endpoint listener.

• Endpoint Group - Each endpont group is associated with AWS region. Endpoint groups include one or more endpoints in a region. You can increase or reduce the percentage of traffic that would be otherwise directed to an endpoint group by adjusting a setting called a traffic dial. The traffic dial lets you easily do performance testing or blue/green deployment testing for new releases across different AWS regions, for example.

• Endpoint - Endpoints can be NLB, ALB, EC2 instances or Elastic IP addresses. An ALB endpoint can be an internet-facing or internal. Traffic is routed to endpoints based on configuration options that you choose, such as endpoint weights. For each endpoint, you can configure weights, which a numbers that you can use to specify the proportion of traffic to route to each one. This can be useful, for example, to do performance testing within a region.