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AWS Global Accelerator vs Cloudfront: A Comprehensive Comparison

Today, in this fast-paced digital world, every second matters when it comes to loading speed and user experience of the website. These days, the majority of websites depend heavily on performance and speed. Modern applications are accessed by people worldwide. Performance, availability, and security requirements for these applications may be rigorous. 

It is not easy to respond with low latencies to every user, irrespective of the point of access, due to the global nature of these use cases. AWS provides two services, Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator, to address these issues.

Because of its speed, reliability, and performance, Amazon Web Services has consistently been the industry leader in cloud computing globally. Because of the variety of services, AWS offers a broad range of features to improve our businesses.

In this article, we will explain the overviews of AWS Global Accelerator and CloudFront, their main features, and the key differences between AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront. 

Overview of AWS Global Accelerator

AWS Global Accelerator is a service offered by Amazon that uses edge locations to look for the optimal pathway from your users to your applications. 

For instance, you have a banking application that is scattered through multiple AWS regions and low latency is a must. Global Accelerator will route the user to the nearest edge location and then route it to the closest regional endpoint where your applications are hosted. 

Key Features of AWS Global Accelerator

  1. Static IPs: AWS Global Accelerator provides two static IP addresses that work as a fixed entry point to your application. It makes it easier to manage and more flexible to the changes.
  1. Health Checks: The service continuously monitors the health of your application endpoints and automatically directs traffic to healthy endpoints, ensuring high availability.
  1. Multiple Region: AWS Global Accelerator allows you to route traffic to multiple AWS regions globally, offering seamless failover and load balancing across different regions.
  2. Global Network: By using the AWS global network, traffic is routed through the most efficient paths, decreasing latency and improving performance.

Use cases of AWS Global Accelerator

AWS Global Accelerator is ideal for applications where high availability, low latency, and global reach are critical, such as:

  1. Gaming Applications: For real-time gaming applications where latency can significantly impact the user experience.
  2. Streaming Applications: Streaming services that require uninterrupted and high-quality delivery.
  3. Banking/Financial Services: Applications needing secure, low-latency connections for real-time transactions.
  4. Business Applications: Any business-critical application that requires high performance and availability.

Overview of Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that is used to deliver static assets such as videos, images, and files with security to various devices around the globe with low latency. 

For example, let’s assume you have a streaming website and you have thousands of videos in your repository. It is inefficient to serve these videos individually to a user whenever requested for it. This needs high bandwidth and high storage utilization to reduce frequent downtimes, video buffering, and, irritated users who are trying to load their favorite shows. 

Increasing the speed of the website is as simple as offloading the videos, thumbnails, and any static assets from your server to Amazon S3, using CloudFront. 

Key Features of Amazon CloudFront

  1. Global Edge Network: CloudFront has a vast network of edge locations around the world, allowing content to be delivered from the closest point to the user.
  2. Content Caching: Static and dynamic content can be cached at edge locations, reducing the load on your origin servers and speeding up content delivery.
  3. Integration with other AWS security Features: CloudFront integrates with other features such as AWS Shield and AWS WAF for web application firewall features, ensuring secure content delivery.
  4. Customizable Content Delivery Features: You can define how your content is cached and delivered, including setting up custom error pages, using multiple origin servers, and configuring geographic restrictions.
  5. Real-time Monitoring and Analytics: CloudFront provides detailed metrics and logs for monitoring your content delivery and optimizing performance.

Use Cases of Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is best suited for scenarios where content delivery speed and efficiency are paramount. Examples include:

  1. Website Acceleration: Enhancing the performance of your website by delivering static and dynamic content quickly to users.
  2. Video Streaming: Providing high-quality video streaming experiences by caching media files close to your audience.
  3. Software Distribution: Distributing software updates and patches efficiently to users worldwide.
  4. API Acceleration: Improving the responsiveness of your APIs by caching responses and reducing latency.

Key Differences between AWS Global Accelerator and CloudFront 

While both AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront aim to improve performance and user experience, they are used to serve different needs and use cases.

1. Purpose: AWS Global Accelerator vs CloudFront 

AWS Global Accelerator focuses on improving the performance and availability of entire applications by optimizing network paths and providing static IP addresses for consistent access. Whereas Amazon CloudFront focuses on accelerating the delivery of web content by caching it at edge locations and reducing latency through proximity.

2. Use Cases: Amazon Global Accelerator vs CloudFront

AWS Global Accelerator is fit for applications that require global reach with high availability and low latency, such as gaming, media, and financial/banking services. On the other hand, AWS CloudFront is considered ideal for content-heavy applications where fast and efficient content delivery is critical, such as websites, video streaming, and software distribution.

3. Network Optimization: Global Accelerator vs CloudFront

Global Accelerator uses the global network to route traffic through the most efficient paths, avoiding the congested parts of the traffic while Amazon CloudFront uses edge locations to cache content close to users, reducing the distance data needs to travel and improving access speed.

4. Performance: Amazon Global Accelerator vs CloudFront

AWS Global Accelerator improves the overall performance of the application by reducing latency and ensuring high availability through health checks and automatic failover while AWS CloudFront increases the content delivery speed by caching frequently accessed content at edge locations, minimizing the load on origin servers.

5. Security: AWS Global Accelerator vs CloudFront

AWS Global Accelerator provides built-in DDoS protection through AWS Shield and can be integrated with AWS WAF for additional security measures. On the other hand, CloudFront offers robust security features, including AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and SSL/TLS encryption for secure content delivery.

6. Price: AWS Global Accelerator vs CloudFront

AWS Global Accelerator prices are based on the amount of data transferred through the accelerator and the number of accelerator units transmitted whereas AWS CloudFront’s costs depend on the data transferred out to the internet and the number of HTTP/HTTPS requests, along with additional features like custom SSL certificates and field-level encryption.

Which One is Perfect for you?

Choosing one perfect between AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront depends on your specific requirements and use cases.

If your primary goal is to enhance the performance and availability of a global application with low latency, AWS Global Accelerator is the better choice.

If you need to accelerate web content delivery, such as static asset files, videos, and APIs, Amazon CloudFront is more suitable.

In some cases, both can complement each other. For example, you might use AWS Global Accelerator to optimize the network path to your application while leveraging Amazon CloudFront to cache and deliver content efficiently. 

This combination can provide you with extensive solutions, ensuring high performance, availability, and user satisfaction.

How SupportFly Can Help You?

Are you finding difficulties with AWS services? Optimizing your AWS cloud infrastructure can be a frustrating task. Here, the role of SupportFly’s AWS professional services comes into play. We have expertise in helping businesses like yours leverage the full potential of AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront to enhance performance, scalability, and security.

Why Choose SupportFly?

  1. Expertise: Our team of certified AWS professionals and consultants has extensive experience in deploying and managing AWS services. We understand the needs of AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront, ensuring you get the best configuration for your needs.
  1. Customized and tailored Solutions: Our services are customized to meet your specific requirements. Whether you need to improve application performance with AWS Global Accelerator or optimize content delivery with Amazon CloudFront, we provide solutions that align with your needs.
  1. 24/7 Customer Support: Our commitment doesn’t end with deployment. We offer ongoing monitoring, management, and support to ensure your AWS infrastructure runs smoothly.
  1. AWS Global Accelerator Setup and Optimization
  2. Amazon CloudFront Deployment and Management
  3. Performance Monitoring and Tuning
  4. Security and Compliance
  5. AWS migration and transfer

Get Started with SupportFly

Enhance your AWS infrastructure today with SupportFly’s expert management and consulting services. Contact us to learn how we can help you leverage AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront to achieve unparalleled performance and reliability.

Conclusion

In summary, both AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront improve the performance and deliverability of the content of the applications. They address different aspects of content delivery and networking and are used for different use cases. Depending on your specific needs, you may choose to use one or both in your AWS architecture.