VPC Global Accelerator

Question 1

What is Global Accelerator?

Answer 1

Global Accelerator is a service in which you create accelerators to improve the availability and performance of your application for local and global users.

And Global Accelerator directs traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network. And this improves the availability and performance of your internet applications that are used by a global audience.

Question 2

Name and describe the 7 components of Global Accelerator.

Answer 2

1. Static IP addresses - two are provided by default or you can bring your own.
2. Accelerator - an accelerator directs traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network to improve the availability and performance of your internet applications. And each accelerator includes
   one or more listeners.
3. DNS Name - Global Accelerator assigns each accelerator a default DNS name, that points to the static IP addresses that the Global Accelerator assigns you. Depending on the use case, you can use your accelerators static IP addresses or DNS name to route traffic to your accelerator, or set up DNS records to route traffic using your own custom domain name.
4. Network Zone - network zone services the static IP addresses for your accelerator from a unique IP subnet. Similar to an AWS Availability Zone, a network zone is an isolated unit with its own set of physical infrastructure.

When you configure an accelerator, by default, Global Accelerator allocates two IPv4 addresses for it. If one IP address from a network zone becomes unavailable due to IP address blocking by certain client networks, or network disruptions, client applications can retry on the healthy static IP address from the other isolated network zone.

5. Listener - A listener processes inbound connections
   from our clients to Global Accelerator, based on the port or port ranges and protocols that you configure.
   And Global Accelerator obviously is going to support
   TCP and UDP protocols.

And each listener has one or more endpoint groups
associated with it, and then traffic is forwarded to the endpoints in one of the groups. And you associate endpoint groups with the listener by specifying the regions that you want to distribute the traffic to. And then traffic is distributed to optimal endpoints within the endpoint groups associated with the listener.

6. End Point Group - each End Point Group is associated with a specific AWS region, so it might be us-east-1, us-west-1, et cetera. Endpoint groups include one or more endpoints in the region, and you can increase or reduce the percentage of traffic that would otherwise be directed to an endpoint group by adjusting a setting called the traffic dial.

The traffic dial lets you easily do performance testing
or blue-green deployments testing for new releases across different AWS regions.

7. Endpoint - endpoints are simply things like network load balancers, application load balancers, EC2 instances or elastic IP addresses. And an application load balancer endpoint can be internet-facing or it can be internal, and then traffic is routed to endpoints
   based on configuration options that you choose,
   such as endpoint weights.

You can have weighted endpoints as well. For each endpoint you can configure weights, which are numbers that you can use to specify the proportion of traffic to each one, and this can be useful, for example, to do things like performance testing within a particular region.

Question 3

Name (only) the 7 components of Global Accelerator.

Answer 3

1. Static IP Addresses
2. Accelerator
3. DNS Name
4. Network Zone
5. Listener
6. Endpoint Group
7. Endpoint