AWS Global Accelerator FAQs

AWS Global Accelerator includes the following benefits:

Instant regional failover: AWS Global Accelerator automatically checks the health of your applications and routes user traffic only to healthy application endpoints. If the health status changes or you make configuration updates, AWS Global Accelerator reacts instantaneously to route your users to the next available endpoint.

High availability: AWS Global Accelerator has a fault-isolating design that increases the availability of your application. When you create an accelerator, you are allocated two IPv4 static IP addresses that are serviced by independent network zones. Similar to Availability Zones, these network zones are isolated units with their own physical infrastructure and serve static IP addresses from a unique IP subnet. 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.

No variability around clients that cache IP addresses: Some client devices and internet resolvers cache DNS answers for long periods of time. So when you make a configuration update, or there’s an application failure or change in your routing preference, you don’t know how long it will take before all of your users receive updated IP addresses. With AWS Global Accelerator, you don’t have to rely on the IP address caching settings of client devices. Change propagation takes a matter of seconds, which reduces your application downtime.

Improved performance: AWS Global Accelerator ingresses traffic from the edge location that is closest to your end clients through anycast static IP addresses. Then traffic traverses the congestion-free and redundant AWS global network, which optimizes the path to your application that is running in an AWS Region. 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%.

Easy manageability: The static IP addresses provided by AWS Global Accelerator are fixed and provide a single entry point to your applications. This lets you easily move your endpoints between Availability Zones or between AWS Regions, without having to update your DNS configuration or client-facing applications. Use cases include A/B testing, application updates, and failover simulations. Corporate proxies can also whitelist your application’s static IP addresses in their firewalls.

Fine-grained control: AWS Global Accelerator lets you set a traffic dial for your regional endpoint groups, to dial traffic up or down for a specific AWS Region when you conduct performance testing or application updates. In addition, if you have stateful applications, you can choose to direct all requests from a user to the same endpoint, regardless of the source port and protocol, to maintain client affinity. These features give you fine-grained control.

Yes. While you might not want to use the intelligent traffic routing capabilities of AWS Global Accelerator, there are a number of advantages to using static IP addresses. First, by using these addresses, you increase the Quality of Service (QoS) for your users by onboarding their traffic onto the AWS global network as close to them as possible. Typically, traffic must take multiple hops through the public internet, over potentially congested and non-redundant network paths, to reach your destination AWS Region. With AWS Global Accelerator, you get to leverage the AWS globally redundant network to help improve your application availability and performance. Second, you have the freedom to easily move your application between AWS Regions without changing your public interface. This means that you can plan for the future, knowing that if your needs change, you can easily migrate or add additional AWS Regions without worrying about how your users will connect to your applications.

You may want to run your applications in multiple AWS Regions for regional redundancy and to improve performance by running your applications closer to your users. By providing a network layer between your application and clients, AWS Global Accelerator can perform health checks, and then automatically route traffic around failed endpoints, without disrupting clients. This graceful shutdown and startup of new endpoints improves availability and performance for your users while ensuring that internet traffic is routed to the closest available endpoint.

AWS Global Accelerator provides you with a set of static IP addresses that can map to multiple application endpoints across AWS Regions, to improve redundancy. If your application experiences failure in a specific AWS Region, AWS Global Accelerator automatically detects the unhealthy endpoints and redirects traffic to the next optimal AWS Region, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery.

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

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

You can Bring Your Own IP address ranges (BYOIP) to AWS Global Accelerator, which enables you to use your own IP addresses as a fixed entry point to your application endpoints. This allows you to move your on-premises applications that have hardcoded IP address dependencies to AWS, without making any client-facing changes. This is helpful for example in regulated environments that require allow-listing of IP address ranges. The accelerators that use your own IP addresses work exactly the same as your accelerators which use Amazon-provided IP addresses. For more details, please read the documentation.

No, you can only advertise an IPv4 pool from either one of the services.

While Global Accelerator’s IP addresses and EC2 Elastic IP addresses are both static addresses, there are some differences between the two. First, 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 you to easily scale out your 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.

You can bring a maximum of two IP ranges to your account.

Via BYOIP, the most specific address range that you can bring is /24. The first 24 bits of the IP address specify the network number. For example, 198.51.100 is the network number for IP address 198.51.100.0.

You can use ARIN, RIPE, and APNIC registered prefixes.

No, you can only bring IP address ranges that you own to AWS Global Accelerator. These ranges will be those that you have purchased from internet registries.

A custom routing accelerator is a new type of accelerator in Global Accelerator. It allows you to use your own application logic to deterministically route one or more users to a specific Amazon EC2 instance destination in a single or multiple AWS Regions. This is useful for use cases where you want to control which session on an EC2 instance your user traffic is sent to. One example is a multi-player gaming application where you want to assign multiple players to a single session on a game server, based on factors such as geographic location, player skill, and gaming configuration. Other examples are VoIP, EdTech, and social media applications that assign multiple users to a specific media server to initiate voice, video, and messaging sessions. With a custom routing accelerator, you can direct multiple users to a unique port on your accelerator, and their traffic will be routed to a specific destination IP address and port that your application session is running on.

Standard accelerators automatically route traffic to a healthy endpoint that is nearest to your user. Since they're designed to load balance traffic, you can't deterministically route multiple users to a specific EC2 destination behind your accelerator. Custom routing accelerators allows you to do just that. Another difference is that standard routing accelerators support Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, EC2 instances, and Elastic IPs as endpoints. Custom routing accelerators support only VPC subnet endpoints, each containing one or more EC2 instances that are running your application.

With a custom routing accelerator, you can deterministically route multiple users to a specific destination IP address and port that your application session is running on. You simply direct users to a specific port on your Global Accelerator. Users can connect to either of the two static anycast IP addresses allocated to your accelerator. When your users connect to your endpoints by using the accelerator IP address and port, your traffic enters the AWS global network at the closest edge location. Your custom routing accelerator has mapped this accelerator port to a specific EC2 instance and port within a VPC subnet, and routes your user traffic there. The mapping from the accelerator port to your EC2 instances within each VPC subnet is preconfigured and static. This means that your application can query for the mapping using an API, store it, and then use it to control how Global Accelerator routes client traffic. If you add or remove endpoints after creating an accelerator, the mappings for existing endpoints don't change.

A VPC subnet endpoint is a new type of endpoint introduced with this feature. Each VPC subnet endpoint, which could be in a single or multiple Regions, contains the IP addresses of the EC2 instances that host your application. With a custom routing accelerator, you can put your accelerator in front of up to thousands of EC2 instances running in a single or multiple VPCs. Custom routing accelerators support VPC subnet endpoints with a maximum size of /17 and route traffic only to EC2 instances within each subnet.

Custom routing accelerators don't provide external health checks for your VPC subnet endpoints or the EC2 instances in them. In this scenario, every accelerator port is mapped to a specific EC2 instance private IP address and port. So your application can monitor the health of your EC2 instances, and then if an instance becomes unhealthy, you can control traffic fail over to another specific healthy instance by directing user traffic to a different accelerator IP address and port combination.

If you anticipate needing more destinations, you can simply set up more custom routing accelerators with additional endpoints located in additional subnets. Then update your custom application logic to use the IP addresses of the new accelerator and the new port mapping to reach each instance and port.

Global Accelerator supports IPv4 traffic towards all endpoints, and IPv6 traffic towards Application Load Balancer Endpoints.

AWS Global Accelerator supports both TCP and UDP protocols.

First, some client devices and internet resolvers cache DNS answers for long periods of time. So when you make a configuration update, or there’s an application failure or change in your routing preference, you don’t know how long it will take before all of your users receive updated IP addresses. With AWS Global Accelerator, you don’t have to rely on the IP address caching settings of client devices. Change propagation takes a matter of seconds, which reduces your application downtime. Second, with Global Accelerator, you get static IP addresses that provide a fixed entry point to your applications. This lets you easily move your endpoints between Availability Zones or between AWS Regions, without having to update the DNS configuration or client-facing applications.