Networking & CDN
AWS Global Accelerator
AWS Global Accelerator exposes static anycast IP addresses and routes TCP or UDP connections over the AWS global network to healthy regional Application or Network Load Balancers, EC2 instances, or Elastic IP endpoints.
Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with AWS Global Accelerator.
AWS Global Accelerator pricing and cost programs
Pricing model: Accelerator and data-transfer usage
- On-Demand
- Available
- Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
- Not applicable
- Savings Plans
- Not applicable
- Spot
- Not applicable
Billing dimensions: Accelerator hours · Data transfer premium · Source and destination Regions
Programs and modes: Standard accelerators · Custom routing accelerators
Hourly accelerator charges and data transfer premiums both apply.
Free Tier: Service-specific — verify current offers
Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.
Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.
Why implement AWS Global Accelerator?
- Provides fixed global IP addresses and uses the AWS backbone to route users to healthy endpoints, reducing dependence on DNS cache expiration for traffic shifts.
- Supports endpoint weights, regional traffic dials, deterministic failover, client-affinity options, bring-your-own IP, metrics, and flow logs.
- Works with regional load balancers, EC2 instances and Elastic IPs while integrating Shield protection and optional client-IP preservation for eligible endpoints.
How to implement AWS Global Accelerator
- Confirm the protocol and endpoint types, static-IP, client-IP, Region, compliance, health, recovery-time and cost requirements; distinguish accelerator health from application business health.
- Create accelerator listeners and regional endpoint groups, configure health checks or load-balancer health, set weights and traffic dials, restrict endpoint security, and enable logs and metrics.
- Test client routing, idle timeouts, endpoint removal, zonal and regional failure, dial changes and the documented behavior when no endpoints are healthy; rehearse controlled shifts before production incidents.
AWS Global Accelerator best practices
- Deploy endpoints in at least two Regions when regional resilience is the goal, use representative health checks, and account for the fact that if no endpoint is healthy Global Accelerator routes to all endpoints.
- Use traffic dials for controlled regional changes and endpoint weights for distribution within a Region; change them through reviewed automation and monitor new connections, health and errors.
- Validate client-IP preservation against the full data path: AWS documents that preserved traffic can bypass Gateway Load Balancer, Network Firewall, or network ACL controls, so use required security groups and a supported topology.
AWS Global Accelerator use cases and server impact
- Multi-Region application failover
- Static global IPs for allowlisted clients
- Low-latency TCP and UDP global entry points
Replaces global traffic-director appliances and reduces internet-path variability, while regional endpoint capacity, health semantics, firewall topology, data residency, failover testing, and application recovery remain yours.
Official implementation resources
Commonly paired AWS services
- Elastic Load Balancing — Load balancing
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud — Resizable virtual servers
- Amazon Route 53 — DNS & routing
- AWS Shield — DDoS protection
- AWS WAF — Web app firewall
- Amazon CloudWatch — Metrics & logs
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud — Isolated virtual network