What is AWS Global Accelerator

AWS Global Accelerator is a service that allows you to route traffic to your applications using the AWS global network instead of the internet. The internet can be congested and AWS claim that by using their private network infrastructure you can improve the connection speed and performance by as much as 60%.

Global Accelerator (GA) provides you with two public static IP addresses that users can connect to in order to reach your application endpoint. GA then optimises the path from those IP addresses to your application which results in lower latency and better network performance.

When something goes wrong network wise, GA will re route traffic along a different route to the application endpoints you have defined, such as application load balancers, network load balancers, EC2 instances or Elastic IPs without the end user having to take any action on their end. GA finds the nearest healthy endpoint and takes traffic down that route to reach your application.

GA can be initiated with a single action in the Elastic Load Balancing console or in a couple of minutes if you connect to your application in a different way using either UDP and TCP traffic