Reach more players using AWS Global Accelerator

Your players expect a great in-game experience, with low latency and uninterrupted play. But, as the number of concurrent players grows, so does the complexity of your IP management and the likelihood of latency inducing routing problems. AWS Global Accelerator simplifies traffic routing, improves availability, and improves performance for your game by as much as 60 percent.

Scale to meet player demand across the globe

Global Accelerator moves your traffic off the public internet and onto the AWS network through 80+ edge locations. No matter what entry point or server your players are connecting through, Global Accelerator provides two customer facing static IPs. These static IPs are announced from the AWS edge locations around the world via anycast, and route traffic back to regional endpoints, such as your EC2 instances and load balancers, over the Amazon network. This feature enables you to scale and reconfigure your endpoints, even handle endpoint failures, on the fly without interrupting play or requiring client updates.

Provide lower latency for players

As an online game developer, latency and jitter are your enemy, ruining the in-game experience for even your most engaging games. Global Accelerator combats this by moving your player’s data on to our congestion-free network. This reduces the number of network hops and the physical distance your player data travels. Once on our network, data moves from client to server and back up to 60 percent more efficiently than on the public internet. Acceleration is supported for both your Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic and your in-game User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic.

Give your players a reliable experience

You may be running your game servers across multiple AWS Regions and Availability Zones to support disaster recovery (DR), higher availability, lower latency, or compliance. Global Accelerator can detect that your game’s endpoint is failing in your primary AWS Region. It will instantly trigger traffic rerouting to your endpoint in the next available, closest AWS Region. Traffic routing can also be manually set or re-directed through in-console dials. Traffic dials enable you to perform blue/green deployments or A/B tests at global scale without taking down your game servers. For example, JoyCity experienced 8x fewer timeouts and network latency decreased by over 150 milliseconds when they tested Global Accelerator.

Protect your game and players

Global Accelerator helps mitigate the risk of malicious attacks. By reducing the number of networks your data passes through, and narrowing entry to two static IPs, you create a smaller virtual surface area for attack. Decreased surface area combines with default protection from AWS Shield to decrease downtime and latency from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

To learn more about Global Accelerator, check out this tutorial for getting started. There’s also a self-paced Global Accelerator Workshop that guides you step by step in creating your first Accelerator.