AWS Global Accelerator
- What it is
- Provides two static anycast IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point to your application.
- Traffic enters the AWS global network at the nearest edge location and travels over AWS’s private backbone instead of the public internet.
- Why
- Lower and more consistent latency, better throughput, and instant regional failover (health-check driven, no DNS TTL to wait out).
- Static IPs simplify allowlisting on client firewalls.
- Works with non-HTTP traffic
- TCP and UDP: gaming, VoIP, IoT, MQTT, financial protocols.
- Not to be confused with
- Amazon CloudFront — caches cacheable HTTP/HTTPS content at the edge. Global Accelerator caches nothing; it routes and proxies.
- The one-line difference
- CloudFront = content delivery (caching). Global Accelerator = network path optimization + static IPs + fast failover.