AWS Global Accelerator

Introduction

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that helps us improve the availability and performance of the applications that we offer to our global users. It’s easy to set up, configure, and manage.

It provides static IP addresses that provide a fixed entry point to our applications and eliminate the complexity of managing specific IP addresses for different AWS Regions and Availability Zones.

AWS Global Accelerator always routes user traffic to the optimal endpoint based on performance, reacting instantly to changes in application health, our user’s location, and policies that we configure. It’s a self-service, pay-per-use offering, requiring no long-term commitments or minimum fees.

AWS Global Accelerator utilizes the Amazon global network, allowing us to improve the performance of our applications by lowering latency.

Benefits of AWS Global Accelerator

• Improve resiliency and availability • Simplified global traffic management • Protect your applications • Accelerate latency-sensitive applications

AWS Global Accelerator automatically checks the health of our applications and routes user traffic only to healthy application endpoints. If the health status changes or we make any configuration updates, AWS Global Accelerator reacts instantaneously to route our users to the next available endpoint.

AWS Global Accelerator chooses the optimal AWS Region based on the geography of end clients, which reduces first-byte latency and improves performance by as much as 60%. AWS Global Accelerator has a fault-isolating design that increases the availability of our application. When we create an accelerator, we are allocated two IPv4 static IP addresses that are serviced by independent network zones.

If one static IP address becomes unavailable due to IP address blocking or unreachable networks, AWS Global Accelerator provides fault tolerance to client applications by rerouting to a healthy static IP address from the other isolated network zone.

AWS Global Accelerator can detect an unhealthy endpoint and take it out of service in less than one minute.

Use our own IP

Can Bring Your Own IP address ranges (BYOIP) to AWS Global Accelerator, which enables us to use our own IP addresses as a fixed entry point to our application endpoints. This allows us to move our on-premises applications that have hardcoded IP address dependencies to AWS, without making any client-facing changes.

We can bring a maximum of two IP ranges to our account.

Global Accelerator’s static IP addresses vs EC2 Elastic IP addresses

Global Accelerator’s IP addresses can be associated with one or more endpoints - Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers or EC2 instances, in any number of AWS Regions. This allows us to easily scale out our applications to multiple AZ’s or AWS Regions.

Elastic IPs on the other hand are tied to a single AWS resource, such as a load balancer or an EC2 instance, in a single AWS Region. Second, Global Accelerator’s IP addresses can only support client-generated connections, unlike Elastic IPs which support both, client and server -generated connections. Third, Global Accelerator’s IP addresses are advertised from the AWS’s expansive network of edge locations. Traffic ingresses onto the highly performant and available AWS network as close as possible to your users. Elastic IPs are advertised from a single AWS Region at a time.

Compliance support

AWS Global Accelerator certifications make it easier for us to verify our high security standards and meet our own regulatory and compliance obligations. It has been assessed to comply with ISO 9001, 27001, 27017, 27018, 27018, and SOC (System & Organization Control) and HIPAA-eligible.

Set up AWS Global Accelerator

Create an accelerator:

When we create our accelerator, AWS Global Accelerator provisions two static IP addresses for it. Then we can configure one or more listeners to process inbound connections from end clients to our accelerator, based on the protocol and port that we specify.

Configure endpoint groups:

We can choose one or more regional endpoint groups to associate to our accelerator’s listener by specifying the AWS Regions to which we want to distribute traffic. Our listener routes requests to the registered endpoints in this endpoint group.

AWS Global Accelerator monitors the health of endpoints within the group using the health check settings defined for each endpoint. We can configure a traffic dial percentage for each endpoint group, which controls the amount of traffic that an endpoint group accepts. By default, the traffic dial is set to 100% for all regional endpoint groups.

Register endpoints for endpoint groups:

We can register one or more regional resources, such as Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, EC2 Instances, or Elastic IP addresses, in each endpoint group. Then we can set weights to choose how much traffic is routed to each endpoint.

AWS Global Accelerator Regions support

AWS Global Accelerator is now available through 104 Points of Presence globally and supports application endpoints in 21 AWS Regions.

AWS Global Accelerator Edge locations are located in:

North America

Edge Locations: Ashburn, VA (3); Atlanta, GA; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Columbus, OH; Dallas-Fort Worth, TX; Denver, CO; Hillsboro, OR; Houston, TX; Kansas City, MO; Los Angeles, CA (2); Miami, FL; Minneapolis, MN; Montreal, QC; New York, NY; Newark, NJ (2); Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ; Querétaro, Mexico (2); Salt Lake City, UT; San Jose, CA; Seattle, WA (2); Toronto, ON; Vancouver, BC;

Europe

Edge Locations: Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Athens, Greece; Berlin, Germany; Brussels, Belgium; Bucharest, Romania; Budapest, Hungary; Copenhagen, Denmark; Dublin, Ireland; Dusseldorf, Germany; Frankfurt, Germany (2); Hamburg, Germany; Helsinki, Finland; Lisbon, Portugal; London, England (2); Madrid, Spain; Manchester, England; Marseille, France; Milan, Italy; Munich, Germany; Oslo, Norway; Palermo, Italy; Paris, France (2); Prague, Czech Republic; Rome, Italy; Sofia, Bulgaria; Stockholm, Sweden; Vienna, Austria; Warsaw, Poland; Zagreb, Croatia; Zurich, Switzerland

Asia

Edge Locations: Bengaluru, India; Bangkok, Thailand; Chennai, India; Hong Kong, China (2); Hyderabad, India; Jakarta, Indonesia (2); Kolkata, India; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Manila, Philippines; Mumbai, India; New Delhi, India; Osaka, Japan; Seoul, South Korea (2); Singapore (2); Taipei, Taiwan (2); Tokyo, Japan; Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam (1)

Australia and New Zealand

Edge Locations: Auckland, New Zealand; Melbourne, Australia; Perth, Australia; Sydney, Australia

South America

Edge Locations: Bogota, Colombia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Fortaleza, Brazil; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Santiago, Chile; São Paulo, Brazil (2)

Middle East

Edge Locations: Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Fujairah, United Arab Emirates; Manama, Bahrain; Tel Aviv, Israel; Muscat, Oman

Africa

Edge Locations: Cape Town, South Africa; Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya

AWS Global Accelerator pricing

In AWS Global Accelerator, we are charged for each accelerator that is provisioned and the amount of traffic in the dominant direction that flows through the accelerator. An accelerator is the resource we create to direct traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network.

Customers will typically set up one accelerator for each application, but more complex applications may require more than one accelerator. For every accelerator that is provisioned (both enabled and disabled), we are charged a fixed hourly fee and an incremental charge over your standard Data Transfer rates, also called a Data Transfer-Premium fee (DT-Premium). DT-Premium is calculated every hour on the dominant direction of your traffic, i.e. inbound traffic to our application or outbound traffic from our application to our users on the internet.

Fixed fee:

For every full or partial hour when an accelerator runs in our account, we are charged $0.025 until it is deleted.

Data Transfer-Premium fee (DT-Premium):

This is a rate per gigabyte of data transferred over the AWS network. The DT-Premium rate depends on the AWS Region (source) that serves the request and the AWS edge location (destination) where the responses are directed. We will only be charged DT-Premium in the dominant data transfer direction.

The DT-Premium fee for AWS Global Accelerator applies to all traffic that flows through AWS Global Accelerator, regardless of whether the destination is to the internet, to another AWS Region, or to an Availability Zone. The DT-Premium fee is in addition to normal EC2 Data Transfer Out fees charged for your application endpoints running in AWS Region(s).

Case Study

Skyscanner - With AWS Global Accelerator, response time decreased from more than 200 milliseconds to less than 4 milliseconds, a 98 percent improvement."

Lever - enabling AWS Global Accelerator, Lever (multinational customer) experienced a 51.2% reduction in mean end-to-end app load times.

JoyCity - AWS Global Accelerator dropped the number of network timeouts by 8 times in some countries.