AWS Global Accelerator components

AWS Global Accelerator includes the following components:

Static IP addresses

By default, Global Accelerator provides you with static IP addresses that you associate with your accelerator. The static IP addresses are anycast from the AWS edge network. For IPv4, Global Accelerator provides two static IPv4 addresses. For dual-stack, Global Accelerator provides a total of four addresses: two static IPv4 addresses and two static IPv6 addresses. If you bring your own IP address range to AWS (BYOIP) to use with Global Accelerator (IPv4 only), you can instead assign IPv4 addresses from your own pool to use with your accelerator. For more information, see Bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) in Global Accelerator.

The IP addresses serve as single fixed entry points for your clients. If you already have Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, Amazon EC2 instances, or Elastic IP address resources set up for your applications, you can easily add those to a standard accelerator in Global Accelerator. This allows Global Accelerator to use static IP addresses to access the resources. If you'd like to access an API Gateway by using Global Accelerator static IP addresses, see the following blog post for more information: Accessing an Amazon API Gateway via static IP addresses provided by AWS Global Accelerator.

The static IP addresses remain assigned to your accelerator for as long as it exists, even if you disable the accelerator and it no longer accepts or routes traffic. However, when you delete an accelerator, you lose the static IP addresses that are assigned to it, so you can no longer route traffic by using them. You can use IAM policies, such as tag-based permissions, with Global Accelerator to limit the users who have permissions to delete an accelerator. For more information, see ABAC with Global Accelerator.

Accelerator

An accelerator directs traffic to endpoints over the AWS global network to improve the performance of your internet applications. Each accelerator includes one or more listeners.

There are two types of accelerators:

• A standard accelerator directs traffic to the optimal AWS endpoint based on several factors, including the user’s location, the health of the endpoint, and the endpoint weights that you configure. This improves the availability and performance of your applications. Endpoints can be Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, Amazon EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses.

• A custom routing accelerator lets you deterministically route multiple users to a specific EC2 destination behind your accelerator, as is required for some use cases. You do this by directing users to a unique IP address and port on your accelerator, which Global Accelerator has mapped to the destination. Note that custom routing accelerators do not support dual-stack for IP addresses.

For more information, see Types of accelerators.

DNS name

Global Accelerator assigns each accelerator a default Domain Name System (DNS) name, similar to a1234567890abcdef.awsglobalaccelerator.com, that points to the static IP addresses that Global Accelerator assigns to you or that you choose from your own IP address range. If you have a dual-stack accelerator, Global Accelerator also assigns you a dual-stack DNS name, similar to a1234567890abcdef.dualstack.awsglobalaccelerator.com that points to the four static IP addresses for your dual-stack accelerator.

Depending on the use case, you can use your accelerator's static IP addresses or DNS name to route traffic to your accelerator, or set up DNS records to route traffic using your own custom domain name. For more information, see Support for DNS addressing in AWS Global Accelerator.

Network zone

Similar to an AWS Availability Zone, a network zone is an isolated unit with its own set of physical infrastructure. When you create an accelerator, Global Accelerator provides you with a set of static IP addresses: two static IPv4 addresses for an accelerator with an IPv4 IP address type or four static IP addresses for a dual-stack accelerator (two IPv4 addresses and two IPv6 addresses). Global Accelerator serves one static IP address per network zone from a unique IP subnet for each IP address family. If one address from a network zone becomes unavailable, due to IP address blocking by certain client networks or network disruptions, client applications can retry on the healthy static IP address from the other isolated network zone.

Listener

A listener processes inbound connections from clients to Global Accelerator, based on the port (or port range) and protocol (or protocols) that you configure. A listener can be configured for TCP, UDP, or both TCP and UDP protocols. Each listener has one or more endpoint groups associated with it, and traffic is forwarded to endpoints in one of the groups. You associate endpoint groups with listeners by specifying the Regions that you want to distribute traffic to. With a standard accelerator, traffic is distributed to optimal endpoints within the endpoint groups associated with a listener.

Endpoint group

Each endpoint group is associated with a specific AWS Region. Endpoint groups include one or more endpoints in the Region. With a standard accelerator, you can increase or reduce the percentage of traffic that would be otherwise directed to an endpoint group by adjusting a setting called a traffic dial. The traffic dial lets you easily do performance testing or blue/green deployment testing, for example, for new releases across different AWS Regions.

Endpoint

An endpoint is the resource that Global Accelerator directs traffic to.

Endpoints for standard accelerators can be Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses. An Application Load Balancer endpoint can be an internet-facing or internal. Traffic for standard accelerators is routed to endpoints based on the health of the endpoint along with configuration options that you choose, such as endpoint weights. For each endpoint, you can configure weights, which are numbers that you can use to specify the proportion of traffic to route to each one. This can be useful, for example, to do performance testing within a Region.

Endpoints for custom routing accelerators are Amazon VPC (VPC) subnets with one or many Amazon EC2 instances that are the destinations for traffic.