Global Accelerator

Even with CDN caching, traffic that has to hit an origin still traverses the unpredictable public internet for however many hops separate the user from the nearest AWS edge. AWS Global Accelerator solves this by giving you static anycast IP addresses that route user traffic onto AWS’s private global network backbone at the nearest edge location, sending it the rest of the way over AWS’s own fast, reliable network instead of the public internet.

• Global Accelerator is a global service, exposing 2 static anycast IPs that never change, regardless of which regional endpoints are behind them.
• It routes to endpoints (ALBs, NLBs, EC2 instances, Elastic IPs) across multiple regions, automatically directing users to the closest healthy one.
• Unlike CloudFront (which caches content), Global Accelerator is purely about network path optimization — it doesn’t cache anything.

graph LR
User(("User")) --> AGA["Global Accelerator (static anycast IP)"]
AGA -->|"AWS backbone"| ALB1["ALB — Region A"]
AGA -->|"AWS backbone"| ALB2["ALB — Region B"]

Global Accelerator bills a fixed hourly fee per accelerator plus a data transfer premium on top of standard rates — more expensive than plain data transfer, priced for the improved network path.

• CloudFront vs. Global Accelerator: CloudFront caches HTTP(S) content at the edge (good for static/cacheable web content); Global Accelerator optimizes the network path for any TCP/UDP traffic, including non-HTTP protocols (gaming, IoT, VoIP) — a key exam distinguisher.
• Global Accelerator’s static IPs never change, even during failover between regions — useful when clients or firewalls whitelist specific IPs and DNS-based failover (like Route 53) isn’t fast or reliable enough.
• Automatic, fast regional failover without a DNS change or TTL wait is the headline resilience benefit tested on the exam.
• It complements, rather than replaces, Route 53 and CloudFront — the three are often combined in the same architecture for different jobs (DNS routing, content caching, network acceleration).