How customer benefits from Global Accelerator and How to launch Linux OS from EC2-instance as GUI
What is AWS Global Accelerator?
AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that helps us improve the availability and performance of the applications that we offer to our global users. It’s easy to set up, configure, and manage.
It provides static IP addresses that give a fixed entry point to our applications and eliminates the complexity of managing specific IP addresses for different AWS Regions and Availability Zones.
AWS Global Accelerator always routes user traffic to the optimal endpoint based on performance, reacting instantly to changes in application health, our user’s location, and policies that we configure. It’s a self-service, pay-per-use offering, requiring no long-term commitments or minimum fees.
AWS Global Accelerator utilizes the Amazon global network, allowing us to improve the performance of our applications by lowering latency.
The IP addresses are announced from multiple edge locations around the world, allowing your traffic to enter the AWS backbone as close to you as possible, instead of traversing large parts of the public internet.
Let’s visualize this. In the image below we’re hosting an app in Ireland and not using Global Accelerator. The red lines denote traffic from different visitors over the public internet.
Now let’s look at the same app, but with Global Accelerator enabled. The green lines denote traffic within Amazon’s private networks. The green circles indicate Global Accelerator edge locations.
Benefits
- Improve global application availability
AWS Global Accelerator continually monitors the health of your application endpoints, such as your Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, or Elastic IPs, instantly reacting to changes in their health or configuration. AWS Global Accelerator will then redirect user traffic to healthy endpoints that deliver the best performance and availability to your users.
- Accelerate your global applications
AWS Global Accelerator optimizes the network path, taking advantage of the vast, congestion-free AWS global network. Regardless of where your users are located, AWS Global Accelerator intelligently routes traffic to the endpoint that provides the best application performance.
- Easily manage endpoints
AWS Global Accelerator’s static IP addresses make it easy to move endpoints between Availability Zones or AWS Regions without needing to update your DNS configuration or change client-facing applications.
Performance Improvements
Over the last six months, the AWS Global Accelerator team has been making improvements to their network, like improving routing for optimized paths to AWS’ edge network, supporting Global Accelerator PoPs in newer cities, and introducing performance-enhancing features such as TCP termination. In March 2020, we re-ran the tests to understand the impacts of these optimizations. Check out the latest edition of the report for updated performance metrics that include network latency, jitter, and standard deviation.
Table 1: Network latency measurements with and without Global Accelerator show steady improvement over time.
While AWS was peering with Peer 1 Network, a sub-optimal routing resulted in traffic going to Washington, DC, in October 2019. But by working closely with Peer 1 to correctly route to the LA edge location, AWS was able to alter the network path resulting in a 20% uplift to network latency.
Figure: — AWS Global Accelerator traffic from Los Angeles enters AWS’ network in Washington, DC, while accessing a service in the us-east-1
Global Edge Network
AWS Global Accelerator uses a global network of 104 Points of Presence in 88 cities across 48 countries. AWS Global Accelerator Edge locations are located in Asia:
Asia
Edge Locations: Bengaluru, India; Bangkok, Thailand; Chennai, India; Hong Kong, China (2); Hyderabad, India; Jakarta, Indonesia (2); Kolkata, India; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Manila, Philippines; Mumbai, India; New Delhi, India; Osaka, Japan; Seoul, South Korea (2); Singapore (2); Taipei, Taiwan (2); Tokyo, Japan; Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam (1)
How it all works
To understand how Global Accelerator works, let’s first review a few of the key terms used when deploying an accelerator:
Accelerator — When you deploy Global Accelerator, you create a configuration for deployment known as an accelerator.
Listener — When you configure an accelerator, you must configure at least one listener to process inbound connections from clients to the accelerator, based on the protocol and port.
Endpoint Group — Endpoint groups define the different AWS Regions where your application is deployed.
Traffic Dial — Configured on an endpoint group to dictate the percentage of traffic an endpoint group can receive.
Endpoint — An endpoint is an Elastic IP address, Network Load Balancer, or Application Load Balancer that is associated with an endpoint group.
Endpoint Weight — This is configured on the endpoint to determine how requests are distributed among endpoint groups with multiple endpoints.
Behind the scenes
- When a request is made to an accelerator static IP address, the request is first routed to a nearby Global Accelerator edge location over the public internet via the Anycast BGP protocol.
- The accelerator accepts the request if there is a listener configured that matches the protocol and port, then determines the most optimal endpoint group based on:
- Geographic proximity to the edge location.
- Traffic dial settings
- The health of the endpoints in the endpoint group. Note: Global Accelerator constantly checks the health of endpoints configured under an endpoint group to identify if an endpoint is healthy.
Let’s see it in action️
In this blog post, I’ll show you how to use these features to distribute traffic across multiple AWS Regions and across endpoints within an AWS Region. To demonstrate this, I will deploy a Global Accelerator in front of redundant applications fronted by AWS Application Load Balancer in three different AWS Regions, as shown in the following diagram.
Then I’ll use the Global Accelerator traffic dials to shift traffic between the Regions. In this example, I’ll show you how to send half of Europe’s normal traffic to the North American and Asia Regions.
Finally, I’ll show you how to add a new endpoint within an existing Region and gradually shift traffic from the existing endpoint over to the new endpoint.
