AWS Global Accelerator
AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service of Amazon Web Services that uses the AWS global network and its edge locations around the world to improve the availability and performance of applications. It is often paired with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Amazon Route 53 to route traffic to the healthiest, best-performing endpoint.
Key points
- Uses the AWS global network and its worldwide edge locations to route application traffic.
- Provides two static Anycast IPv4 addresses (four addresses total for dual-stack accelerators — two IPv4 and two IPv6) that act as a fixed entry point to endpoints such as Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, EC2 instances, and Elastic IPs.
- Improves the availability and performance of applications.
- Delivers highly available applications with fast failover for multi-region and multi-AZ architectures.
- Standard accelerator — improves availability for internet applications by directing traffic to the nearest healthy Region. Custom routing accelerator — maps one or more users to a specific destination among many.
- Improves performance specifically for TCP and UDP traffic (not limited to HTTP), routing it over the AWS global network instead of the public internet.
- Distinct from Amazon CloudFront: Global Accelerator does not cache content — it routes non-cacheable traffic, including non-HTTP TCP/UDP protocols, to the nearest healthy endpoint rather than serving from edge caches.