AWS Global Accelerator improves the resilience of multi-region applications through several key mechanisms:
1. Multi-Region Endpoint Support and Automatic Failover
Global Accelerator allows you to deploy your application endpoints across multiple AWS Regions. It continuously monitors the health of all these endpoints. If an endpoint in one region becomes unhealthy or unavailable, Global Accelerator automatically and instantly reroutes user traffic to the next best available endpoint in another region. This failover happens rapidly, typically within less than a minute, ensuring minimal disruption to application availability[1][4][6].
2. Static Anycast IP Addresses
Global Accelerator provides a set of static Anycast IP addresses that serve as fixed entry points for your application. These IP addresses are advertised from AWS edge locations globally. This means clients always connect to the same IP addresses regardless of which region is serving the traffic, simplifying DNS management and eliminating the need for clients to track changing IPs. The Anycast IPs route user traffic to the closest healthy endpoint, improving both availability and performance[3][6].
3. Network Zones for Redundancy
AWS Global Accelerator uses isolated network zones, each with its own physical infrastructure and IP subnet. It serves one static IP address from each network zone. If an IP address from one zone becomes unavailable due to network disruptions or IP blocking, client applications can retry on the healthy IP address from another network zone. This design enhances fault tolerance at the network level[1][2].
4. Active-Active and Active-Standby Multi-Region Architectures
Global Accelerator supports both active-active and active-standby multi-region deployment models. In active-active setups, traffic is load-shared across multiple regions, improving availability and reducing latency by serving users from the closest region. In active-standby setups, one region actively serves traffic while others remain on standby, ready to take over if the active region fails. Global Accelerator manages traffic routing and failover seamlessly in both models[3][8].
5. Health Checks and Traffic Management
Global Accelerator performs continuous health checks on endpoints and only routes traffic to healthy endpoints. You can configure traffic dials to control the proportion of traffic sent to each region, enabling gradual traffic shifts or load balancing across regions. This fine-grained control helps maintain application resilience and performance during failover or scaling events[3][9].
6. Integration with AWS Global Infrastructure
Global Accelerator leverages AWSâs global network of Regions and Availability Zones, which are physically separated and connected by low-latency, highly redundant networking. This underlying infrastructure supports fault tolerance and high availability at a global scale[1].
In summary, AWS Global Accelerator enhances the resilience of multi-region applications by providing static global entry points, continuously monitoring endpoint health, automatically redirecting traffic away from unhealthy regions, and supporting flexible multi-region deployment architectures. This ensures high availability, rapid failover, and consistent performance for global applications[1][3][4][6].
Citations:
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/disaster-recovery-resiliency.html
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/maximising-application-resiliency-with-aws-global-accelerator/
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/deploying-multi-region-applications-in-aws-using-aws-global-accelerator/
[4] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/introduction-benefits-of-migrating.html
[5] https://www.applify.co/blog/what-is-aws-global-accelerator
[6] https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/faqs/
[7] https://cloudvisor.co/aws-guides/aws-global-accelerator/
[8] https://sudoconsultants.com/building-a-scalable-and-resilient-multi-region-application-architecture-on-aws/
[9] https://repost.aws/questions/QUo8q_KZ2fTz2PjaiJc9ztEQ/using-aws-global-accelerator-service-to-distribute-traffic-across-multiple-regions