Benefits:
Global reach: Clients automatically routed to the closest healthy region.
Better performance: Traffic enters the AWS backbone at the nearest edge location → avoids the “slow lanes” of the public internet.
Simplified whitelisting: Only two IPs to manage in firewalls.
Cross-region failover: If one region fails, traffic instantly reroutes to another region.
1. The Problem Without Global Accelerator
- As your application grows, you might run many endpoints (ALBs, NLBs, EC2 instances) across multiple AWS Regions.
- Each endpoint has its own IP address.
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That means:
- You need to manage and update IP addresses in firewalls, client apps, or DNS.
- If you add/remove instances (scaling, deployment, or failover), the IP addresses change, so you’d have to update everything again.
This becomes complex and error-prone, especially for apps where clients cannot be updated often (IoT devices, medical equipment, etc.).
2. What AWS Global Accelerator Does
AWS Global Accelerator solves this by giving you two static IP addresses that never change.
These act as fixed entry points to your global application.
- You associate your regional resources (ALBs, NLBs, EC2s) with Global Accelerator endpoint groups.
- Global Accelerator then intelligently routes traffic to the best endpoint (based on proximity, health, and routing policies).
- To the outside world, your entire app is always reachable through the same two IPs — regardless of how many regions or endpoints are behind it.
3. Key Benefits
- Static IPs → Simplified management
- Instead of whitelisting 100s of changing EC2 IPs, you only whitelist two static IPs in your firewall, DNS, or client apps.
- Performance boost
- Traffic enters the AWS global network backbone at the nearest edge location, reducing latency compared to standard internet routing.
- High availability
- If one endpoint/region becomes unhealthy, Global Accelerator automatically routes traffic to the next healthy one.
- Flexible deployments
- You can add/remove endpoints, do blue/green deployments, or A/B testing without ever changing client IPs.
4. Endpoint Groups
- Endpoints (ALBs, NLBs, EC2s) are organized into endpoint groups, one per region.
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Example:
- Endpoint Group 1 → EC2 instances + ALB in us-east-1
- Endpoint Group 2 → EC2 instances + ALB in eu-west-1
Global Accelerator balances traffic across them based on traffic dials, weights, and health checks.
5. Real-World Example
Imagine a retail IoT application:
- Thousands of POS (Point-of-Sale) devices in stores connect to your backend.
- If backend IPs change (new instances, scaling, region failover), updating all POS devices is impossible.
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With Global Accelerator:
- Devices always connect to the same two static IPs.
- Behind the scenes, you can add/remove endpoints, shift traffic between regions, or deploy new versions seamlessly.
| Use Case | Just Load Balancer | With Global Accelerator |
|---|---|---|
| App only runs in one region, users mostly local | ✅ ALB/NLB is enough | Not needed |
| App runs in multiple regions (global users) | ❌ Route 53 latency routing is an option but slower failover | ✅ GA gives faster routing + HA |
| You need static IPs for clients/firewalls/IoT devices | ❌ ALB only gives DNS name (IPs can change) | ✅ GA provides 2 static IPs |
| You want better performance for global clients | ❌ Internet routing might be inefficient | ✅ GA routes over AWS backbone |
| You need cross-region disaster recovery | ❌ ALB works only in-region | ✅ GA can failover to another region |
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