Understanding AWS Global Accelerator: How It Routes Traffic Through a Private Network for Faster Performance

In today's world of highly distributed applications, performance, reliability, and low latency are critical for providing a seamless user experience. For businesses operating globally, ensuring that their applications are fast and responsive no matter where their users are located is a major challenge. This is where AWS Global Accelerator comes into play. In this article, we'll explore how AWS Global Accelerator works, specifically how it routes traffic through AWS's private global network and how it helps you deliver faster and more reliable experiences for your users, even when they are located far from your application's origin. What is AWS Global Accelerator? AWS Global Accelerator is a service that improves the availability and performance of your global applications by routing traffic through AWS's vast network of edge locations. It works by directing user traffic to the optimal endpoint, typically based on the lowest latency, best network health, and other performance factors. Unlike traditional load balancers, which only distribute traffic within a specific region, AWS Global Accelerator is designed to operate on a global scale, ensuring that requests are routed to the best-performing AWS region or endpoint. The Role of Edge Locations and AWS's Private Network A key feature of AWS Global Accelerator is its use of AWS edge locations - the same infrastructure that powers AWS CloudFront, AWS's Content Delivery Network (CDN). These edge locations are spread across the globe, allowing users from virtually any location to access applications with minimal latency. When a user makes a request, the traffic doesn't just travel over the public internet to your origin server. Instead, AWS Global Accelerator leverages AWS's private global network to route the traffic. This private network is faster, more reliable, and more secure than the public internet, significantly improving performance and reducing the chances of packet loss or other network issues. How Global Accelerator Routes Traffic Let's consider a scenario to better understand how this routing works: Your EC2 Instance is in Mumbai: Suppose you have an EC2 instance running in the Mumbai region (ap-south-1). A User is in US-East-1: A user in US-East-1 (N. Virginia) wants to access your application hosted on the Mumbai-based EC2 instance. Without AWS Global Accelerator, the request from the user would have to traverse the public internet, which could involve multiple ISPs, resulting in higher latency, potential packet loss, and unpredictable network conditions. However, with Global Accelerator, things work a bit differently: Request Sent to Edge Location: The user's request first travels to the nearest AWS edge location, which is likely located somewhere in the United States. This minimizes the time it takes for the request to reach the AWS network. Routing Through AWS's Private Network: Once the request arrives at the edge location, AWS Global Accelerator routes it over the private global network to your EC2 instance in Mumbai. This private network is far more optimized and reliable than public internet routing, meaning that the request is less likely to encounter network congestion or delays. Optimal Path Selection: AWS Global Accelerator is constantly monitoring the health and performance of different AWS regions. If, for any reason, your Mumbai-based EC2 instance experiences issues (like high latency or downtime), Global Accelerator can dynamically reroute traffic to another healthy region (e.g., Singapore or the US-East region), ensuring that your application remains available with minimal disruption. Response Sent Back to User: Once the EC2 instance processes the user's request, the response is sent back to the nearest edge location, which then returns the response to the user with the lowest possible latency. Why You Don't Need to Replicate Your EC2 Instances One of the key advantages of using AWS Global Accelerator is that it eliminates the need to replicate your EC2 instances across multiple regions or edge locations. Even though the user is located far from your origin server (in this case, in the US while your EC2 instance is in Mumbai), Global Accelerator still improves performance by routing the traffic through the AWS global network. This reduces latency, as traffic is handled by AWS's high-performance network instead of going through the public internet. Because Global Accelerator uses intelligent routing based on factors like health and performance, it can automatically route traffic to the best available region without you needing to worry about managing multiple copies of your infrastructure. Benefits of AWS Global Accelerator Here are some of the key benefits of using AWS Global Accelerator: Improved Performance: By leveraging AWS's global network, Global Accelerator can reduce latency and improve throughput for your global users. Increased Availability: If

May 6, 2025 - 07:10

Understanding AWS Global Accelerator: How It Routes Traffic Through a Private Network for Faster Performance

In today's world of highly distributed applications, performance, reliability, and low latency are critical for providing a seamless user experience. For businesses operating globally, ensuring that their applications are fast and responsive no matter where their users are located is a major challenge. This is where AWS Global Accelerator comes into play.

In this article, we'll explore how AWS Global Accelerator works, specifically how it routes traffic through AWS's private global network and how it helps you deliver faster and more reliable experiences for your users, even when they are located far from your application's origin.

What is AWS Global Accelerator?

AWS Global Accelerator is a service that improves the availability and performance of your global applications by routing traffic through AWS's vast network of edge locations. It works by directing user traffic to the optimal endpoint, typically based on the lowest latency, best network health, and other performance factors.

Unlike traditional load balancers, which only distribute traffic within a specific region, AWS Global Accelerator is designed to operate on a global scale, ensuring that requests are routed to the best-performing AWS region or endpoint.

The Role of Edge Locations and AWS's Private Network

A key feature of AWS Global Accelerator is its use of AWS edge locations - the same infrastructure that powers AWS CloudFront, AWS's Content Delivery Network (CDN). These edge locations are spread across the globe, allowing users from virtually any location to access applications with minimal latency.

When a user makes a request, the traffic doesn't just travel over the public internet to your origin server. Instead, AWS Global Accelerator leverages AWS's private global network to route the traffic. This private network is faster, more reliable, and more secure than the public internet, significantly improving performance and reducing the chances of packet loss or other network issues.

How Global Accelerator Routes Traffic

Let's consider a scenario to better understand how this routing works:

Your EC2 Instance is in Mumbai: Suppose you have an EC2 instance running in the Mumbai region (ap-south-1).
A User is in US-East-1: A user in US-East-1 (N. Virginia) wants to access your application hosted on the Mumbai-based EC2 instance.

Without AWS Global Accelerator, the request from the user would have to traverse the public internet, which could involve multiple ISPs, resulting in higher latency, potential packet loss, and unpredictable network conditions.

However, with Global Accelerator, things work a bit differently:

Request Sent to Edge Location: The user's request first travels to the nearest AWS edge location, which is likely located somewhere in the United States. This minimizes the time it takes for the request to reach the AWS network.
Routing Through AWS's Private Network: Once the request arrives at the edge location, AWS Global Accelerator routes it over the private global network to your EC2 instance in Mumbai. This private network is far more optimized and reliable than public internet routing, meaning that the request is less likely to encounter network congestion or delays.
Optimal Path Selection: AWS Global Accelerator is constantly monitoring the health and performance of different AWS regions. If, for any reason, your Mumbai-based EC2 instance experiences issues (like high latency or downtime), Global Accelerator can dynamically reroute traffic to another healthy region (e.g., Singapore or the US-East region), ensuring that your application remains available with minimal disruption.
Response Sent Back to User: Once the EC2 instance processes the user's request, the response is sent back to the nearest edge location, which then returns the response to the user with the lowest possible latency.

Why You Don't Need to Replicate Your EC2 Instances

One of the key advantages of using AWS Global Accelerator is that it eliminates the need to replicate your EC2 instances across multiple regions or edge locations.

Even though the user is located far from your origin server (in this case, in the US while your EC2 instance is in Mumbai), Global Accelerator still improves performance by routing the traffic through the AWS global network. This reduces latency, as traffic is handled by AWS's high-performance network instead of going through the public internet.

Because Global Accelerator uses intelligent routing based on factors like health and performance, it can automatically route traffic to the best available region without you needing to worry about managing multiple copies of your infrastructure.

Benefits of AWS Global Accelerator

Here are some of the key benefits of using AWS Global Accelerator:

Improved Performance: By leveraging AWS's global network, Global Accelerator can reduce latency and improve throughput for your global users.
Increased Availability: If one endpoint or region experiences issues, Global Accelerator can automatically reroute traffic to healthy regions, ensuring that your application remains available and responsive.
Simplified Architecture: You don't need to replicate resources like EC2 instances across multiple regions. Global Accelerator takes care of intelligent routing, so you can focus on building your application rather than managing complex infrastructure.
Global Reach: No matter where your users are located - in North America, Europe, Asia, or anywhere else - AWS Global Accelerator ensures they get the best performance when accessing your application.

Real-World Use Cases for Global Accelerator

E-Commerce Platforms: If you run an e-commerce site that serves users globally, you need to ensure that customers can browse products, make purchases, and complete transactions quickly, regardless of where they are located. AWS Global Accelerator can help ensure that product pages load faster and transactions are processed with minimal delay.
Gaming Applications: Online multiplayer games require low-latency connections for real-time interactions. With AWS Global Accelerator, you can ensure that players around the world connect to game servers with the least amount of delay, making for a smoother gaming experience.
Media Streaming: Streaming services that deliver video and audio content to a global audience rely on low-latency connections to provide buffer-free streaming experiences. AWS Global Accelerator can optimize routing for users across different regions to ensure consistent media delivery.

Conclusion

AWS Global Accelerator is an invaluable tool for businesses looking to optimize the performance, availability, and reliability of their global applications. By leveraging AWS's private global network and edge locations, it helps ensure that users anywhere in the world can access your application with lower latency and higher availability - without the need for complex replication of infrastructure.

Whether you're serving customers on a global scale or need to ensure that your applications are always available and responsive, AWS Global Accelerator is a powerful solution that helps take your applications to the next level.