AWS Global Accelerator
Two static anycast IPs that pull user traffic onto the AWS global network at the nearest edge and route it to the closest healthy Region.
Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-09-09
Key facts
- 01Gives you 2 static anycast IPs as a fixed front door — users hit the nearest edge location, then traffic rides the AWS backbone instead of the public internet
- 02Endpoints are ALB, NLB, EC2, or Elastic IP, in one Region or many — it sits in front of load balancers, it doesn't replace them
- 03Health checks pull an unhealthy endpoint out in under a minute, with no DNS TTL to wait out because the IPs never change
- 04Works for any TCP or UDP traffic and caches nothing — this is routing, not content delivery
Exam triggers
Phrases and scenarios that point here.
- "Static IP addresses" for a multi-Region app, or IPs a customer must allow-list in their firewall
- Non-HTTP traffic — gaming (UDP), VoIP, IoT — needing lower latency → Global Accelerator, not CloudFront
- "Fast regional failover" or "clients cache DNS too long" → Global Accelerator, not Route 53 failover
- "Improve performance for global users" on dynamic content that can't be cached
Not this service
- Caching static content at the edge — images, video, JS → CloudFront
- DNS-level routing with weighted, latency, or geolocation records → Route 53
Use cases
- 01Multiplayer game servers, where players in Jakarta and São Paulo connect to the same two IPs, join the AWS backbone at their local edge, and get less jitter than the open internet gives them
- 02Active/passive DR across two Regions — a client that cached DNS an hour ago still lands in the healthy Region, because the entry IPs never moved
- 03A B2B API whose enterprise customers allow-list your IPs in their firewalls, so you can change Regions or swap load balancers without raising a change request on their side
- 04Lifting an on-prem app with hardcoded IPs into AWS — BYOIP lets you bring your own /24 so client configs are never touched
- 05Region rollouts using the traffic dial: send 10% to the new Region, watch the dashboards, dial up or roll back instantly with no DNS changes
How it's charged
- 01Fixed hourly fee per accelerator, billed whether it's enabled or disabled — an idle accelerator still costs money, so delete it rather than disable it
- 02Data Transfer-Premium (DT-Premium) per GB is charged on top of your normal data transfer bill, not instead of it
- 03DT-Premium is calculated hourly on the dominant direction only — inbound or outbound, whichever is larger that hour
- 04The DT-Premium rate depends on the source Region and the destination edge location, so the same GB costs more for a user far from your app than one nearby
- 05Endpoint costs stay separate: ALB/NLB hours, EC2 data transfer out, and public IPv4 address charges all still apply
