To simulate traffic and test AWS Global Accelerator performance effectively, you can follow these detailed steps and best practices:
Use Realistic Traffic Simulation Methods
- Real User Monitoring (RUM): This method uses actual client-side code (e.g., browser, app) to measure performance metrics based on real production content transactions. It reflects the real user experience, including last-mile network variability.
- Synthetic Monitoring: This involves using tools with globally distributed nodes that simulate user paths through your application endpoints. Synthetic tests provide stable, repeatable results for comparison but may not capture real-world last-mile conditions as accurately as RUM.
When possible, prefer RUM for more accurate reflection of user experience, but synthetic testing is useful for controlled performance comparisons[1].
Conduct Your Own Performance Tests
If you cannot use production workloads or RUM, perform synthetic tests with these guidelines:
- Test from Client Locations: Run tests from the physical locations of your users to capture realistic network conditions.
- Measure Key Metrics: Collect data on throughput (data transfer rate), connection latency (round-trip time), network jitter (latency variability), and packet loss.
- Sample Size and Timing: Capture at least 1,000 samples every hour over a 24-hour period to account for traffic peaks and internet congestion, providing a comprehensive performance profile.
- Prepare Endpoints: Ensure your Global Accelerator endpoints (EC2 instances, ALBs, NLBs, or Elastic IPs) can handle the expected volume of connection requests during testing[1].
Tools and Techniques for Traffic Simulation
- AWS Global Accelerator Speed Comparison Tool: This browser-based tool downloads files of selectable sizes over HTTPS/TCP from ALBs in different AWS Regions, comparing Global Accelerator performance against the public internet. It provides a quick way to gauge relative download speeds from various locations[1][6].
- iPerf3: A widely used network testing tool that measures maximum achievable bandwidth using TCP or UDP. To simulate traffic:
1. Install iPerf3 on both the endpoint (e.g., EC2 instance behind Global Accelerator) and the client machine.
2. Run iPerf3 in server mode on the endpoint:
iperf3 --server --interval 20 [-p 5201]
3. Run iPerf3 in client mode from the client machine, targeting the Global Accelerator IP address:
iperf3 --client --interval 10 --time 300 [-p 5201]
4. Customize parameters such as test duration (`--time`), reporting interval (`--interval`), bidirectional testing (`-d`), and JSON output (`--json`) as needed.
This setup allows you to generate sustained TCP/UDP traffic to measure throughput, latency, jitter, and packet loss through Global Accelerator[1].
- Apache Bench (ab): Useful for HTTP load testing by sending multiple HTTP requests to your application endpoints, helping simulate web traffic patterns[1].
Traffic Control During Testing
- Use traffic dials on endpoint groups to control the percentage of traffic sent to each group, allowing you to limit load on specific regions during tests.
- Adjust endpoint weights to distribute traffic proportionally among multiple endpoints in the same group, enabling gradual traffic shifts or canary testing scenarios[4][5].
Additional Recommendations
- Avoid using EC2 instances within AWS as clients for testing, since traffic between EC2 instances uses AWS backbone and will not reflect real internet conditions.
- Test both TCP and UDP traffic if your application uses both protocols.
- Monitor and analyze the collected metrics to identify bottlenecks, packet loss, or latency spikes that could impact user experience.
By following these detailed steps and using the recommended tools, you can simulate realistic traffic to comprehensively test and evaluate AWS Global Accelerator performance. This approach helps ensure your application benefits from Global Acceleratorâs optimized routing and improved network performance[1][3][4].
Citations:
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/traffic-management-with-aws-global-accelerator/
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/measuring-aws-global-accelerator-performance-and-analyzing-results/
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/faqs/
[4] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/introduction-how-it-works.html
[5] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/using-aws-global-accelerator-to-achieve-blue-green-deployments/
[6] https://speedtest.globalaccelerator.aws
[7] https://cloudonaut.io/review-aws-global-accelerator-latency-multi-region-disaster-recovery/
[8] https://www.whizlabs.com/blog/aws-global-accelerator/
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CU71MkCv4o