[ aws ]

globalaccelerator

Description

This is the AWS Global Accelerator API Reference . This guide is for developers who need detailed information about AWS Global Accelerator API actions, data types, and errors. For more information about Global Accelerator features, see the AWS Global Accelerator Developer Guide .

AWS Global Accelerator is a service in which you create accelerators to improve availability and performance of your applications for local and global users.

Warning

You must specify the US West (Oregon) Region to create or update accelerators.

By default, Global Accelerator provides you with static IP addresses that you associate with your accelerator. (Instead of using the IP addresses that Global Accelerator provides, you can configure these entry points to be IPv4 addresses from your own IP address ranges that you bring to Global Accelerator.) The static IP addresses are anycast from the AWS edge network and distribute incoming application traffic across multiple endpoint resources in multiple AWS Regions, which increases the availability of your applications. Endpoints can be Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses that are located in one AWS Region or multiple Regions.

Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route traffic to the optimal regional endpoint based on health, client location, and policies that you configure. The service reacts instantly to changes in health or configuration to ensure that internet traffic from clients is directed to only healthy endpoints.

Global Accelerator includes components that work together to help you improve performance and availability for your applications:

Static IP address

By default, AWS Global Accelerator provides you with a set of static IP addresses that are anycast from the AWS edge network and serve as the single fixed entry points for your clients. Or you can configure these entry points to be IPv4 addresses from your own IP address ranges that you bring to Global Accelerator (BYOIP). For more information, see Bring Your Own IP Addresses (BYOIP) in the AWS Global Accelerator Developer Guide . If you already have load balancers, EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses set up for your applications, you can easily add those to Global Accelerator to allow the resources to be accessed by the static IP addresses.

Warning

The static IP addresses remain assigned to your accelerator for as long as it exists, even if you disable the accelerator and it no longer accepts or routes traffic. However, when you delete an accelerator, you lose the static IP addresses that are assigned to it, so you can no longer route traffic by using them. You can use IAM policies with Global Accelerator to limit the users who have permissions to delete an accelerator. For more information, see Authentication and Access Control in the AWS Global Accelerator Developer Guide .

Accelerator

An accelerator directs traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network to improve availability and performance for your internet applications that have a global audience. Each accelerator includes one or more listeners.

DNS name

Global Accelerator assigns each accelerator a default Domain Name System (DNS) name, similar to a1234567890abcdef.awsglobalaccelerator.com , that points to your Global Accelerator static IP addresses. Depending on the use case, you can use your accelerator’s static IP addresses or DNS name to route traffic to your accelerator, or set up DNS records to route traffic using your own custom domain name.

Network zone

A network zone services the static IP addresses for your accelerator from a unique IP subnet. Similar to an AWS Availability Zone, a network zone is an isolated unit with its own set of physical infrastructure. When you configure an accelerator, by default, Global Accelerator allocates two IPv4 addresses for it. If one IP address from a network zone becomes unavailable due to IP address blocking by certain client networks, or network disruptions, then client applications can retry on the healthy static IP address from the other isolated network zone.

Listener

A listener processes inbound connections from clients to Global Accelerator, based on the protocol and port that you configure. Each listener has one or more endpoint groups associated with it, and traffic is forwarded to endpoints in one of the groups. You associate endpoint groups with listeners by specifying the Regions that you want to distribute traffic to. Traffic is distributed to optimal endpoints within the endpoint groups associated with a listener.

Endpoint group

Each endpoint group is associated with a specific AWS Region. Endpoint groups include one or more endpoints in the Region. You can increase or reduce the percentage of traffic that would be otherwise directed to an endpoint group by adjusting a setting called a traffic dial . The traffic dial lets you easily do performance testing or blue/green deployment testing for new releases across different AWS Regions, for example.

Endpoint

An endpoint is a Network Load Balancer, Application Load Balancer, EC2 instance, or Elastic IP address. Traffic is routed to endpoints based on several factors, including the geo-proximity to the user, the health of the endpoint, and the configuration options that you choose, such as endpoint weights. For each endpoint, you can configure weights, which are numbers that you can use to specify the proportion of traffic to route to each one. This can be useful, for example, to do performance testing within a Region.