AWS Global Accelerator supports optimization of traffic for both TCP and UDP protocols. It improves application performance by routing traffic over the AWS global network to healthy application endpoints in the closest AWS Region, reducing latency and increasing throughput for both TCP and UDP traffic[1][2][4][8].
Key details include:
- Protocol Support: Global Accelerator supports both TCP and UDP protocols for its listeners, allowing you to define listeners for either protocol on specified ports[1][3].
- TCP Optimization: For TCP traffic, Global Accelerator terminates client TCP connections at AWS edge locations near the user, then establishes a new TCP connection to the endpoint in the AWS Region. This edge termination reduces the TCP handshake latency and improves connection setup time, resulting in faster response times and higher throughput[2][5][7].
- UDP Handling: For UDP traffic, Global Accelerator proxies packets at the edge and forwards them to the application endpoints. Unlike TCP, UDP requires IP fragmentation handling; Global Accelerator forwards UDP fragments to the endpoint for reassembly, while TCP fragments are dropped at the edge since they are not supported by the AWS network[2].
- Health Monitoring and Failover: Global Accelerator continuously monitors the health of endpoints and routes traffic away from unhealthy endpoints for both TCP and UDP, ensuring high availability[2][8].
- Traffic Control: You can fine-tune traffic distribution using endpoint weights and traffic dials to control the percentage of traffic sent to each endpoint group, applicable to both TCP and UDP traffic[2][8].
- Client Affinity: For stateful applications, Global Accelerator supports client affinity, ensuring requests from the same client IP are consistently routed to the same endpoint, applicable for both TCP and UDP listeners[3][8].
- IPv6 Support: Global Accelerator supports IPv4 for all endpoints and IPv6 for Application Load Balancer endpoints, with dual-stack accelerators available to serve both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic[6].
In summary, AWS Global Accelerator effectively optimizes and accelerates traffic for both TCP and UDP protocols by terminating TCP connections at the edge, proxying UDP packets, routing over the AWS global network, and providing health-aware, low-latency routing with fine-grained traffic control and client affinity features[1][2][3][4][7][8].
Citations:
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/faqs/
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/introduction-how-it-works.html
[3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/about-listeners.html
[4] https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/features/
[5] https://repost.aws/questions/QUvk103BmESwKA6UudyZfKKA/http-2-support-for-browser-to-global-accelerator-communication
[6] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/introducing-aws-global-accelerator-ipv6/
[7] https://hands-on.cloud/aws-services/global-accelerator/
[8] https://digitalcloud.training/aws-global-accelerator/