AWS Global Accelerator

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service designed to improve the availability, performance, and security of applications accessible over the Internet. Leveraging Amazon’s extensive global infrastructure provides users with a set of static Anycast IP addresses, which act as a fixed entry point to their applications. This service is particularly beneficial for applications with a global user base, as it optimizes the path to the application, thereby reducing latency and improving the overall user experience.

Key features of AWS Global Accelerator

• Static Anycast IPs: Offers two static IP addresses as a single fixed entry point to your applications.
• Performance: Routing user traffic through Amazon’s global network infrastructure accelerates the delivery of your content and applications.
• Health Checking: Continuously monitors the health of your application endpoints and routes traffic only to healthy endpoints.
• Security: Increases the security of your applications by using the AWS global network, which is hardened against attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

AWS Global Accelerator is a fully managed service that handles the underlying complexities, allowing you to focus on your core application development. It is suitable for various use cases, including HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, and UDP traffic.

You can visit the official AWS Global Accelerator page for more detailed information on AWS Global Accelerator.

Understanding Static Anycast IPs

AWS Global Accelerator enhances the performance of your applications by leveraging Static Anycast IPs. These IPs are a consistent entry point to your applications across various AWS Regions.

Here’s what makes them essential:

• Fixed Entry Point: Static Anycast IPs provide a stable entry point to your applications, regardless of the AWS Region they are hosted in.
• Anycast from AWS Edge Locations: These IPs are announced from multiple AWS Edge locations. This means traffic can enter the AWS global network closer to your users, improving latency and performance.
• Association with Regional Resources: You can link these Static Anycast IPs to regional AWS resources or endpoints, such as Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, and Elastic IP addresses.
• No Client-Facing Changes Required: Modifying or replacing endpoints does not necessitate changes on the client side or updates to DNS records.
• Static Nature: The IP addresses provided by an Accelerator are static, ensuring they remain constant as the “front door” for user-facing applications.

By utilizing Static Anycast IPs, AWS Global Accelerator simplifies the way traffic is routed to your applications, enhancing availability and performance without the need for complex DNS management.

Health checking of target endpoints

AWS Global Accelerator ensures that traffic is only directed to healthy, active endpoints. This is achieved through automatic health checks that are performed on the endpoints associated with your static IP addresses.

Here’s how health checking works in AWS Global Accelerator:

• Default Health Checks: By default, AWS Global Accelerator runs health checks automatically to monitor the health of your endpoints.
• Custom Health Check Settings: You have the option to configure the timing and other settings for these health checks. If you’ve set up custom health check settings, Global Accelerator will use these settings depending on your configuration.
• Endpoint Configuration: These settings can be configured directly in Global Accelerator for Amazon EC2 instance or Elastic IP address endpoints, or through the Elastic Load Balancing console for Network Load Balancers or Application Load Balancers.
• Traffic Routing: When an endpoint is added to a standard accelerator, it must pass a health check to be considered healthy and to have traffic directed to it. If there are no healthy endpoints available, Global Accelerator will route requests to all endpoints.

It’s important to note that these health checks are crucial for maintaining high availability and ensuring that your users are not directed to unhealthy or unresponsive applications.

How AWS Global Accelerator routes traffic away from unhealthy applications

AWS Global Accelerator enhances application availability and performance by intelligently routing user traffic to the most optimal endpoints.

Here’s how it manages traffic in the face of unhealthy applications:

• Health Checks: AWS Global Accelerator continually monitors the health of your application endpoints using health check settings that you define. These checks ensure that only healthy, active endpoints receive traffic.
• Automatic Failover: When an endpoint fails a health check and is deemed unhealthy, Global Accelerator automatically reroutes traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint. This process is seamless and helps maintain a consistent user experience.
• Endpoint Groups: Traffic is distributed among endpoint groups, which can span multiple AWS Regions. This distribution is based on performance, user location, and health status, ensuring that users are always directed to the best possible endpoint.
• Weighted Routing: You can control the amount of traffic directed to each endpoint using weighted routing. This feature allows for more granular control over traffic distribution and can be adjusted based on the health of the endpoints.

By leveraging these mechanisms, AWS Global Accelerator ensures that your applications remain available and performant, even when some endpoints become unhealthy. This routing strategy is crucial for maintaining high availability and delivering a low-latency experience to your users.

Importance for Low-Latency Applications

Low-latency is critical for many applications, especially those requiring real-time user interactions or data processing. AWS Global Accelerator is designed to meet the needs of such applications by leveraging the AWS global network infrastructure.

Here’s why AWS Global Accelerator is vital for low-latency applications:

• Consistent Performance: AWS Global Accelerator provides a consistent application performance by directing traffic over the AWS global network, which is optimized for speed and reliability.
• Enhanced Availability: By routing traffic to the nearest optimal endpoint, AWS Global Accelerator ensures that applications are highly available and can serve users with minimal delays.
• Network Congestion Minimization: During internet congestion, AWS Global Accelerator optimizes the path to the application, keeping packet loss, jitter, and latency consistently low.
• Global Reach: Applications can serve a global audience with reduced latency, as AWS Global Accelerator intelligently routes user traffic to the closest AWS endpoint.
• Improved Throughput: By bypassing internet congestion and taking advantage of the AWS backbone network, applications can achieve improved data transfer rates.
• Simplified Architecture: AWS Global Accelerator simplifies the network architecture by handling traffic routing at the edge locations, reducing the complexity of managing traffic on a global scale.

Here are some of the benefits that AWS Global Accelerator provides for low-latency applications:

For applications where every millisecond counts, such as online gaming, financial trading platforms, or interactive media, AWS Global Accelerator is an indispensable tool. It ensures that user experiences are not compromised by delays, leading to higher satisfaction and engagement.

Traffic flow management with traffic dials and endpoint weights

AWS Global Accelerator provides robust traffic flow management capabilities to optimize the performance of your applications. By leveraging traffic dials and endpoint weights, you can fine-tune how traffic is distributed across your endpoint groups. Here’s how you can use these features:

Traffic Dials

Traffic dials allow you to control the amount of traffic that is directed to an endpoint group. This is particularly useful during:

• Deployment phases: Gradually increase traffic to new deployments to monitor performance.
• Recovery scenarios: Limit traffic to an endpoint recovering from an outage to prevent overload.

To adjust the traffic dial, you simply specify a percentage that represents the amount of traffic to be directed to the endpoint group.

Endpoint Weights

Endpoint weights provide a mechanism to adjust the proportion of traffic sent to each endpoint within a group. This is beneficial when you want to:

• Balance loads unevenly: Send more traffic to endpoints with higher capacity.
• Conduct A/B testing: Route different amounts of traffic to test different versions of your application.

You assign a numeric weight to each endpoint, and AWS Global Accelerator distributes traffic proportionally based on these weights.

By utilizing these traffic flow management tools, you can ensure that your applications are not only highly available but also deliver consistent performance.

Health checks in AWS Global Accelerator

AWS Global Accelerator is designed to monitor the health of your application endpoints and route traffic only to healthy ones.

Here’s a detailed look at how health checks work within AWS Global Accelerator:

• Endpoint Monitoring: AWS Global Accelerator continuously checks the status of each endpoint. When you add an endpoint to an accelerator, it must pass a health check to start receiving traffic.
• Health Check Protocols: The service supports TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS protocols for health checks, ensuring that it can interact with a wide range of application types and confirm their operational status.
• Automatic Health Checks: Health checks are performed automatically and regularly to ensure that traffic is not routed to failed or degraded endpoints.
• Custom Health Check Configuration: You can configure health check settings for each endpoint, including the interval between checks, the number of retries, and the timeout period.
• Port and Path Configuration: For HTTP/S health checks, you can specify the path that Global Accelerator uses to ping your application. The default port used for health checks is the same as the listener port, but you can override this if necessary.
• Health Check Failures: If an endpoint fails a health check, AWS Global Accelerator stops routing traffic to it and reroutes traffic to healthy endpoints.
• Custom Routing Accelerators: It’s important to note that health checks are not used with custom routing accelerators, as these accelerators allow you to specify the exact destination for your traffic without automatic failover.

By leveraging AWS Global Accelerator’s health checking capabilities, you can ensure that your application remains available and responsive to your users, even in the face of individual endpoint failures. This contributes to a robust and reliable global application infrastructure.

Client IP Address Preservation

AWS Global Accelerator provides a way to improve the performance of your applications by optimizing the path that user traffic takes through the AWS global network. An important feature within this service is the preservation of client IP addresses. This feature is crucial for applications that require visibility into the original source IP for security measures, analytics, or application logic.

When using AWS Global Accelerator with an internet-facing Application Load Balancer (ALB) as an endpoint, client IP address preservation is enabled by default. This means that the source IP address of the client is preserved and passed through to the ALB, allowing the backend services to see the original IP address of the client.

For Network Load Balancer (NLB) endpoints, client IP address preservation can be enabled on a per-endpoint basis. This allows the backend services, such as EC2 instances, to receive the original client IP address, which can be used for processing client-specific logic or for maintaining client affinity.

Here are some key points about client IP address preservation in AWS Global Accelerator:

• Default Behavior: For new ALB endpoints, client IP preservation is enabled by default.
• Per-Endpoint Configuration: For NLB endpoints, client IP preservation can be enabled or disabled based on your application needs.
• Source IP Visibility: Preserving the client IP address allows backend services to apply logic based on the client’s location or other IP-based attributes.
• Security and Compliance: Knowing the client’s original IP address can be critical for security logging, compliance, and implementing IP-based access controls.

It’s important to note that for endpoints that do not have client IP address preservation enabled, the IP addresses used by the Global Accelerator service at the edge network will replace the client’s source IP address. This could impact applications that rely on the source IP for decision-making processes.

By leveraging client IP address preservation, AWS Global Accelerator ensures that your applications can maintain the benefits of client-specific processing while also enjoying the performance improvements provided by the service.

Terminating TCP connections from clients

AWS Global Accelerator enhances application performance by terminating TCP connections at the AWS Edge location nearest to the client. This feature is pivotal in reducing latency and improving the user experience for globally distributed applications. Here’s how it works:

• Edge-Based Termination: When a client initiates a TCP connection, AWS Global Accelerator terminates this connection at the edge of AWS’s network, which is geographically closer to the user than the application’s endpoint. This reduces the distance that the initial TCP handshake has to travel, thereby decreasing setup time.
• Performance Improvement: By handling the TCP termination at the edge, AWS Global Accelerator can improve client-to-endpoint performance by up to 60%, as the AWS global network is optimized for low-latency, high-throughput, and high-reliability data transfers.
• Automated Routing: After the termination of the TCP connection at the edge, AWS Global Accelerator automatically routes the traffic to the most performant AWS origins in different Regions and/or Availability Zones.

The termination of TCP connections at the edge is a significant feature for applications requiring high performance and low latency. It is particularly beneficial for services that are accessed by users from various geographical locations.

Idle Timeout

AWS Global Accelerator is designed to optimize the path that user traffic takes to your application, improving performance and availability. An important aspect of this service is how it handles idle connections, specifically through the idle timeout setting.

Idle timeout refers to the period of inactivity after which a TCP connection is considered idle and can be terminated by AWS Global Accelerator. According to some sources, the default idle timeout for TCP connections in AWS Global Accelerator is 90 seconds. This means that if no data is sent or received over a connection for this duration, the connection could be closed.

Here are some key points to consider regarding idle timeout:

• Default Timeout: The default idle timeout is set to ensure that resources are used efficiently, without maintaining unnecessary connections.
• Adjustable Timeout: Depending on your application’s needs, you might need to adjust the idle timeout setting. This can be particularly important for applications that have long-lived connections with sporadic traffic.
• Keep-Alive Messages: Implementing TCP keep-alive messages can help prevent connections from being closed prematurely due to the idle timeout.

It is essential to configure the idle timeout setting appropriately for your use case to maintain the desired level of connection persistence.

Remember, the proper management of idle timeout settings can contribute to the overall performance and reliability of your applications using AWS Global Accelerator.

The Role of Static IP Addresses

AWS Global Accelerator enhances the performance of your applications by providing static IP addresses as a fixed entry point for your users globally. These IP addresses are anycast from the AWS edge network, ensuring that user requests are routed to the nearest and most optimal endpoint.

Key Benefits of Static IP Addresses

• Consistent Entry Point: Static IP addresses provide a consistent entry point for your applications, regardless of changes in the backend infrastructure.
• Anycast Routing: The anycast capability of the static IP addresses allows for intelligent routing of user traffic to the nearest available endpoint, which can significantly reduce latency.
• Simplified DNS Management: With static IP addresses, you can avoid the complexities of managing DNS records for multiple endpoints.
• Enhanced Reliability: By default, AWS Global Accelerator offers two static IP addresses to ensure high availability. If one IP address becomes unavailable, the other can continue to serve traffic.

How Static IP Addresses Work

When you create an accelerator in AWS Global Accelerator, you receive two static IP addresses. These addresses are announced from multiple AWS edge locations around the world. As a result, when users send requests to these IP addresses, AWS Global Accelerator routes the traffic to the closest edge location, which then forwards the traffic to the most optimal endpoint based on performance, health, and configured policies.

Use Cases for Static IP Addresses

• Global Services: For services with a worldwide audience, static IP addresses ensure that users have a consistent and reliable way to access your application.
• Performance-Critical Applications: Applications that require low latency can benefit from the anycast routing of static IP addresses, which minimizes the distance data has to travel.

AWS Global Accelerator’s static IP addresses are a powerful feature for optimizing the performance and reliability of your applications. By leveraging these addresses, you can provide a better user experience for your customers around the globe.

How to use traffic dials and endpoint weights

AWS Global Accelerator enhances the performance of your applications by intelligently routing traffic to the closest AWS region and, subsequently, to the most optimal endpoints within that region. To fine-tune this routing behavior, AWS Global Accelerator offers two powerful features: traffic dials and endpoint weights.

Traffic Dials

Traffic dials allow you to control the flow of user traffic to different AWS regions. By default, traffic is directed to the region nearest to your users for the best performance. However, you can adjust the traffic dials to:

• Redirect traffic away from regions that are over capacity.
• Perform maintenance on a region without affecting your service’s availability.
• Gradually increase traffic to a newly added region.

This functionality is particularly useful for managing global traffic during peak loads, maintenance windows, or when scaling out to new regions.

Endpoint Weights

For more granular control within a region that has multiple endpoints, you can assign weights to each endpoint. Endpoint weights dictate the proportion of traffic that each endpoint will receive. This is especially useful for:

• Load balancing traffic across multiple Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, or Elastic IPs.
• Implementing A/B testing or blue/green deployments to roll out new application changes safely.

By adjusting endpoint weights, you can ensure that a specific endpoint does not become overwhelmed with traffic and that users experience consistent performance.

To implement these features, you can follow these steps:

1. Access the AWS Global Accelerator console.
2. Select your accelerator and navigate to the endpoint group you wish to configure.
3. For traffic dials, adjust the percentage to control the amount of traffic directed to the region.
4. For endpoint weights, assign the desired weight to each endpoint within the group.

Remember, the traffic dial is set to 100% by default, which means all traffic is routed to the endpoint group. Adjusting the dial down will proportionally reduce the traffic to that group.

By leveraging traffic dials and endpoint weights, you can optimize the performance and reliability of your applications on AWS, ensuring that your users always have the best possible experience.

Continuous Availability

AWS Global Accelerator is designed to enhance the availability and reliability of your applications. By leveraging the AWS global network, it continuously monitors the health of your application endpoints and intelligently routes traffic to the most optimal paths.

Here’s how AWS Global Accelerator ensures continuous availability:

• Global Static Anycast IP Addresses: AWS Global Accelerator provides two global static anycast IPv4 addresses that serve as a fixed entry point to your application hosted in multiple AWS Regions. This setup improves the availability of your workload by automatically routing user traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint.
• Health Checks: The service performs health checks on your endpoints to ensure that traffic is only sent to healthy endpoints. If an endpoint becomes unhealthy, AWS Global Accelerator reroutes traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint without any manual intervention, minimizing downtime.
• DDoS Protection: AWS Global Accelerator offers scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient DDoS protection at the edge. This ensures that your applications remain available even during DDoS attacks, which are mitigated by the AWS Shield Standard protection that comes with AWS Global Accelerator.
• Integration with AWS Services: AWS Global Accelerator works seamlessly with other AWS services like Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, which automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in response to traffic demand across Availability Zones, further enhancing the availability of your application.
• Traffic Management: In the event of performance degradation or failures, AWS Global Accelerator can instantly react by adjusting traffic policies, ensuring that users are always directed to the best performing and most available endpoint.

By implementing AWS Global Accelerator, you can provide your users with a consistently available and responsive application experience, no matter where they are located.

Pricing and cost management

AWS Global Accelerator is designed to improve the performance of your applications for local and global users. Understanding the pricing and cost management is crucial for optimizing your AWS infrastructure costs. Here’s a breakdown of the costs associated with AWS Global Accelerator:

• Fixed Hourly Fee: AWS Global Accelerator charges a fixed hourly fee for each accelerator that is provisioned in your account. This fee applies regardless of whether the accelerator is enabled or disabled.
• Data Transfer Costs: In addition to the fixed hourly fee, you will incur costs for data transfer. These rates can vary and may be higher depending on the volume of data and the regions involved in the transfer.
• Cost Allocation Tags: To manage costs effectively, AWS allows you to use cost allocation tags. These tags can help you track your spending across multiple services and enforce tag-based budget controls. For more information on using cost allocation tags, refer to the AWS Billing User Guide.
• Monthly Billing: Your total monthly bill for AWS Global Accelerator will include the fixed fees for each accelerator plus the data transfer costs.

For the most up-to-date pricing information and to estimate your costs, please visit the AWS Global Accelerator Pricing page.

Remember that pricing is subject to change, and it’s important to regularly review your usage and the associated costs to ensure that you are managing your AWS resources efficiently.

Setting up and configuring AWS Global Accelerator

Setting up AWS Global Accelerator involves a series of steps that ensure your applications are reachable with improved performance and high availability. Here’s a guide to help you configure AWS Global Accelerator for your needs:

1. Create an Accelerator: Start by creating an accelerator in the AWS Management Console or via the AWS CLI. AWS Global Accelerator will provision two static Anycast IP addresses that serve as the fixed entry points to your applications.
2. Configure Listeners: Set up listeners to process inbound connections based on the protocol (TCP or UDP) and port range that you specify. Listeners direct traffic to endpoint groups.
3. Define Endpoint Groups: Within each listener, define one or more endpoint groups, each corresponding to a specific AWS Region. This is where you’ll direct traffic to your application endpoints, such as Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses.
4. Assign Endpoints: Add one or more endpoints to each endpoint group. AWS Global Accelerator supports various AWS resources as endpoints.
5. Set Traffic Dials: Adjust the traffic dials to control the percentage of traffic that is directed to each endpoint group.
6. Configure Health Checks: Define health check settings for your endpoints to ensure AWS Global Accelerator routes traffic away from unhealthy applications.
7. Client IP Preservation: Optionally, configure client IP address preservation settings if you need to see the original client IP addresses in your applications.
8. Deploy: After configuring your accelerator, listener, endpoint groups, and health checks, deploy the setup to make your applications globally accessible with improved performance.

Remember to review the pricing details as the use of AWS Global Accelerator incurs charges based on the amount of traffic that flows through the accelerator.

By following these steps, you can set up AWS Global Accelerator to route user traffic through the AWS global network infrastructure, optimizing the path to your applications and improving user experience with lower latency and higher availability.

Security measures

AWS Global Accelerator is designed with security as a fundamental aspect of its service, ensuring that applications are protected from various threats while improving performance. Here are some of the key security measures in place:

• AWS Shield Integration: AWS Global Accelerator integrates with AWS Shield, a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS. AWS Shield provides automatic inline mitigation that minimizes application downtime and latency.
• Centralized Security Policy Management: Through the use of AWS Firewall Manager, AWS Global Accelerator allows for centralized management of security policies. This service simplifies your AWS WAF administration and maintenance tasks across multiple accounts and resources.
• AWS Global Network Security: As a managed service, AWS Global Accelerator benefits from the robust security measures of the AWS global network. This includes continuous monitoring and protection against common network and transport layer security threats.
• Static Anycast IP Addresses: AWS Global Accelerator provides a pair of static anycast IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point to your applications hosted in any number of AWS Regions. This not only improves the availability and performance of your applications but also adds a layer of security by abstracting the underlying infrastructure.
• DDoS Events Monitoring: AWS Global Accelerator is added as part of comprehensive protection at the edge, with AWS Firewall Manager enabling centralized monitoring for DDoS events and automated response to such threats.

By leveraging these security measures, AWS Global Accelerator ensures that your applications are not only performant but also secure from a wide array of network threats. This contributes to maintaining the integrity and availability of your services, which is crucial for any online business.

Case Studies and Real-World Applications

AWS Global Accelerator has been instrumental in enhancing the performance of various applications across different industries. Here are some notable case studies and real-world applications:

• Atlassian: The software company Atlassian, known for products like Bitbucket, leveraged AWS Global Accelerator to significantly reduce Bitbucket’s response times. By utilizing the service’s extensive network of over 95 points of presence worldwide, Atlassian managed to improve response times by up to 45%. This improvement is a testament to the effectiveness of AWS Global Accelerator in optimizing application performance on a global scale. Read the Atlassian case study

These case studies demonstrate the versatility and impact of AWS Global Accelerator in real-world scenarios, showcasing its ability to provide low-latency and high-performance solutions for businesses operating on a global scale.

Troubleshooting Common Issues in AWS Global Accelerator

When working with AWS Global Accelerator, you may encounter various issues that can affect the performance and availability of your applications. Here are some common troubleshooting steps and tools you can use to diagnose and resolve these issues:

• Monitor Your Accelerator: Utilize Amazon CloudWatch, flow logs, and AWS CloudTrail to monitor your accelerator’s performance and activity. These tools can help you identify and troubleshoot issues such as reachability problems.
• Check Static IP Addresses: Ensure that the two static IP addresses provisioned for your accelerator are correctly configured and mapped to your application endpoints in different AWS Regions.
• Endpoint Groups Configuration: Verify that your endpoint groups are correctly configured with the appropriate endpoints and that the health check settings are properly set to monitor the health of your endpoints.
• IAM Permissions: If you’re experiencing access issues, make sure that you have the necessary IAM permissions to work with Global Accelerator features.
• Flow Logs: Use flow logs to troubleshoot reachability issues. Analyzing flow log data can help you understand traffic patterns and identify potential connectivity problems.
• Network Zone Peering: AWS Global Accelerator has peering relationships with different ISPs to minimize the impact of network issues. Check if there are any known issues with these peering relationships that could be affecting your accelerator.

Remember to always check the AWS Service Health Dashboard for any ongoing service issues that might impact AWS Global Accelerator and to consult AWS support if you are unable to resolve issues on your own.

Future Developments and Updates in AWS Global Accelerator

As AWS continues to innovate and enhance its services, AWS Global Accelerator is no exception. Here are some of the recent developments and anticipated updates for AWS Global Accelerator:

• Dual-Stack Support: AWS Global Accelerator has added support for dual-stack for Network Load Balancers, allowing the use of both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
• Cross-Account Support: As of November 2023, AWS Global Accelerator supports cross-account endpoints, enabling users to associate endpoints in one AWS account with an accelerator in another.
• New Edge Location: A new edge location in Nigeria has been introduced to improve performance and availability for users in the region.
• Expanded Regional Support: AWS Global Accelerator now supports endpoints in four additional AWS Regions, enhancing global reach and reducing latency.
• IPv6 TCP Termination: There is now TCP termination support for IPv6 traffic, which improves performance for IPv6-enabled applications.

Looking ahead, AWS is likely to continue expanding its Global Accelerator service with new features and enhancements that address the evolving needs of its customers. While specific details on future updates are not always available, AWS’s history of regular service improvements suggests that users can expect ongoing advancements in performance, security, and functionality.

Comparing AWS Global Accelerator with other similar services

When evaluating AWS Global Accelerator against other similar services such as Cloudflare, Akamai, and Google Cloud Load Balancing, it’s important to consider various factors that impact performance, reliability, and use cases. Below is a comparison highlighting key differences and similarities:

• Static IP Addresses: AWS Global Accelerator provides static IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point to applications hosted in one or more AWS Regions. This is similar to the Anycast IP approach used by Cloudflare and Akamai.
• Performance: AWS Global Accelerator is designed to optimize the path to your application for global users, which can lead to improved performance over the public internet. Cloudflare and Akamai also offer performance optimization through their respective CDN and edge network services.
• Health Checks: AWS Global Accelerator conducts health checks on endpoints to ensure traffic is only sent to healthy instances. Google Cloud Load Balancing offers similar health check mechanisms.
• Traffic Management: AWS Global Accelerator allows for traffic flow management using traffic dials and endpoint weights, which is a feature also found in Google Cloud Load Balancing.
• Pricing: The pricing models for these services vary, with AWS Global Accelerator charging for the number of accelerators and the amount of data transferred over the AWS network, while Cloudflare and Akamai have different pricing structures that may include subscription models or usage-based pricing.
• Security: AWS Global Accelerator integrates with AWS Shield for DDoS protection, whereas Cloudflare and Akamai have their own built-in security features to protect against a wide range of online threats.
• Use Cases: AWS Global Accelerator is particularly beneficial for AWS customers looking to improve global application availability and performance. In contrast, Cloudflare and Akamai may be preferred by users who require additional web security services or specialized content delivery networks.

For a more detailed performance comparison, AWS offers the AWS Global Accelerator Speed Comparison Tool, which allows users to compare Global Accelerator performance to the public internet performance from different AWS Regions.

It’s important to note that the best service for your needs will depend on your specific use case, budget, and existing infrastructure. Each service has its strengths and may be better suited for different types of applications and organizational requirements.