Types of accelerators

There are two types of accelerators that you can use with AWS Global Accelerator: standard accelerators and custom routing accelerators. Both types of accelerators route traffic over the AWS global network to improve performance and stability, but they're each designed for different application needs.

Standard accelerator

By using a standard accelerator, you can improve the availability and performance of your applications running on Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, or Amazon EC2 instances. With a standard accelerator, Global Accelerator routes client traffic across regional endpoints based on geo-proximity and endpoint health. It also allows customers to shift client traffic across endpoints based on controls such as traffic dials and endpoint weights. This works for a wide variety of use cases, including blue/green deployment, A/B testing, and multi-Region deployment. To see more use cases, see AWS Global Accelerator use cases.

To learn more, see Work with standard accelerators in AWS Global Accelerator.

Custom routing accelerator

Custom routing accelerators work well for scenarios where you want to use custom application logic to direct one or more users to a specific destination and port among many, while still gaining the performance benefits of Global Accelerator. One example is VoIP applications that assign multiple callers to a specific media server to start voice, video, and messaging sessions. Another example is online real-time gaming applications 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 game mode.

Note

Custom routing accelerators support only the IPv4 IP address type.

To learn more, see Work with custom routing accelerators in AWS Global Accelerator.

Based on your specific needs, you create one of these types of accelerators to accelerate your customer traffic.