Posted On: Mar 23, 2020
Today, AWS Global Accelerator introduces TCP termination at the edge, a feature that automatically increases performance for workloads such as API calls, file uploads, or Voice over IP calls. With this feature, customers can get up to a 40% improvement for traffic throughput within the United States, and up to 60% for traffic across continents.
Typically, a TCP connection is established by using a three-way handshake (that is, three messages) between the client on the internet and the application endpoint in the AWS Region. So the farther away the client is from the endpoint, the longer the initial connection setup takes. With TCP termination at the edge, Global Accelerator reduces initial setup time by establishing a TCP connection between the client and the AWS edge location closest to the client. At nearly the same time, Global Accelerator creates a second TCP connection between the edge location and the application endpoint in the AWS Region. With this process, the client gets a faster response from the Global Accelerator edge location, and the connection from the edge location to the application endpoint in the Region is optimized to run over the AWS global network.
TCP termination at the edge is enabled by default on every accelerator and available at no additional charge. To learn more about Global Accelerator, visit the Global Accelerator product page or create an accelerator.