AWS Global Accelerator supports disaster recovery by enhancing application availability, fault tolerance, and seamless failover across multiple AWS Regions and Availability Zones. Here is a detailed explanation of how it achieves this:
**1. Multi-Region Failover and Traffic Routing
Global Accelerator allows you to deploy your application endpoints in multiple AWS Regions or Availability Zones. It continuously monitors the health of these endpoints using TCP, HTTP, or HTTPS health checks. If it detects an unhealthy endpoint in the primary region, it automatically and instantly reroutes user traffic to the next closest healthy endpoint in another region or zone. This failover happens within seconds, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity during disasters or outages[3][6][7][9][10].
**2. Static Anycast IP Addresses for Fault Isolation
When you create an accelerator, Global Accelerator provides two static IPv4 addresses (or four for dual-stack) that serve as a single fixed entry point for your applications. These IP addresses are served from independent network zones, which are isolated physical infrastructures similar to Availability Zones. If one static IP becomes unavailable due to network disruptions or IP blocking, Global Accelerator automatically reroutes traffic to the other healthy static IP address from a different network zone, providing fault tolerance at the network level[3][6][9][11].
**3. Instantaneous Change Propagation Without DNS Caching Delays
Unlike DNS-based routing solutions that can suffer from caching delays, Global Acceleratorâs use of static IP addresses means configuration changes and failover events propagate instantly to clients. This eliminates variability caused by DNS caching on client devices, ensuring users are quickly directed to healthy endpoints without waiting for DNS cache expiration[6][9].
**4. Leveraging AWS Global Network for Low Latency and High Throughput
Global Accelerator routes traffic through the AWS global network, which offers low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant connectivity between AWS Regions and Availability Zones. This not only improves application performance but also ensures reliable connectivity during failover scenarios, supporting disaster recovery by maintaining consistent application responsiveness[2][5][11].
**5. Support for Active-Active and Active-Passive Disaster Recovery Architectures
Global Accelerator can be used in multi-site active-active deployments where traffic is distributed across multiple regions simultaneously for load balancing and disaster recovery. It also supports active-passive failover models, where traffic is routed primarily to one region and shifted to a secondary region only during failures. This flexibility allows organizations to design disaster recovery architectures that meet their Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)[8][10][12].
**6. Integration with AWS Backup and Infrastructure as Code
For comprehensive disaster recovery, Global Accelerator can be combined with AWS Backup and AWS CloudFormation to automate the restoration of data and infrastructure in the disaster recovery region. This ensures that not only is traffic rerouted, but the necessary application state and environment are restored to meet recovery goals[3].
In summary, AWS Global Accelerator enhances disaster recovery by providing highly available, fault-tolerant, and low-latency global traffic routing with instant failover capabilities. Its static Anycast IP addresses, continuous health monitoring, and use of isolated network zones ensure that applications remain accessible and performant even during regional outages or disasters, enabling rapid recovery and business continuity.
Citations:
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/introduction-benefits-of-migrating.html
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/disaster-recovery-resiliency.html
[3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/disaster-recovery-workloads-on-aws/disaster-recovery-options-in-the-cloud.html
[4] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/what-is-global-accelerator.html
[5] https://cloudchipr.com/blog/aws-global-accelerator
[6] https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/faqs/
[7] https://www.whizlabs.com/blog/aws-global-accelerator/
[8] https://github.com/aws-samples/serverless-disaster-recovery-with-global-accelerator
[9] https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-global-accelerator/
[10] https://cloudonaut.io/review-aws-global-accelerator-latency-multi-region-disaster-recovery/
[11] https://www.nops.io/glossary/what-is-aws-global-accelerator/
[12] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/disaster-recovery-dr-architecture-on-aws-part-iv-multi-site-active-active/
[13] https://intuitive.cloud/blog/mitigate-regional-failover-and-improve-performance-using-aws-global-accelerator