Understanding AWS Global Accelerator use cases

Using AWS Global Accelerator can help you accomplish a variety of goals. This section lists some of them, to give you an idea how you can use Global Accelerator to meet your needs.

Scale for increased application utilization

When application usage grows, the number of IP addresses and endpoints that you need to manage also increases. Global Accelerator enables you to scale your network up or down. It lets you associate regional resources, such as load balancers and Amazon EC2 instances, to two static IPv4 addresses or, for dual-stack, to two static IPv4 addresses and two IPv6 addresses. You include these addresses on allow lists just once in your client applications, firewalls, and DNS records. With Global Accelerator, you can add or remove endpoints in AWS Regions, run blue/green deployment, and do A/B testing without having to update the IP addresses in your client applications. This is especially useful for IoT, retail, media, automotive, and healthcare use cases where you can't easily update client applications frequently.

Acceleration for latency-sensitive applications

Many applications, especially in areas such as gaming, media, mobile apps, ad-tech, and financials, require very low latency for a great user experience. To improve the user experience, Global Accelerator directs user traffic to the application endpoint that is nearest to the client, which reduces internet latency and jitter. Global Accelerator routes traffic to the closest edge location by using Anycast, and then routes it to the closest regional endpoint over the AWS global network. Global Accelerator quickly reacts to changes in network performance to improve your users’ application performance.

Disaster recovery and multi-Region resiliency

You must be able to rely on your network to be available. You might be running your application across multiple AWS Regions to support disaster recovery, higher availability, lower latency, or compliance. If Global Accelerator detects that your application endpoint is failing in the primary AWS Region, it instantly triggers traffic re-routing to your application endpoint in the next available, closest AWS Region.

For more information about how Global Accelerator supports resiliency inherently and in applications that use the service, read the following blog post: Maximising application resiliency with AWS Global Accelerator.

Protect your applications

Exposing your AWS origins, such as Application Load Balancers or Amazon EC2 instances, to public internet traffic creates an opportunity for malicious attacks. Global Accelerator decreases the risk of attack by masking your origin behind two static entry points. These entry points are protected by default from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks with AWS Shield. Global Accelerator creates a peering connection with your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud using private IP addresses, keeping connections to your internal Application Load Balancers or private EC2 instances off the public internet.

Improve performance for VoIP or online gaming applications

Using a custom routing accelerator, you can leverage the performance benefits of Global Accelerator for your VoIP or gaming applications. For example, you can use Global Accelerator for online gaming applications that assign multiple players to a single gaming session. Use Global Accelerator to reduce latency and jitter globally for applications that require custom logic to map users to specific endpoints, such as multiplayer games or VoIP calls. You can use a single accelerator to connect clients to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances running in a single or multiple AWS Regions, while retaining full control over which client is directed to which EC2 instance and port.