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Community Blog Seamless Network Acceleration Using Global Accelerator – Part 1

Seamless Network Acceleration Using Global Accelerator – Part 1

Part 1 of this 2-part series introduces Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator.

By Shantanu Kaushik

The world of IT and infrastructure is at an all-time high. Multiple cloud providers are creating different solutions specific to an enterprise’s or an individual’s IT requirements. The world of IT is undergoing this rapid expansion to accommodate the increasing demand for services and connections required for daily business.

Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator is a network acceleration service that uses high-quality bandwidth and global transmission networks. Global Accelerator enables:

  • Access to the Internet
  • Cross-Region Application Deployment
  • Significant user experience improvements related to Internet services

Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator features:

  • High Network Quality
  • Supreme Security
  • High Availability
  • Low Latency
  • Agile Deployment
  • Quick Activation

Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator (GA) provides multiple access points worldwide. The core functionality of Alibaba Cloud GA is to accelerate and manage the network traffic to offer a more seamless and smoother user experience. The Alibaba Cloud GA ensures high-quality Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) bandwidth and high service reliability, enabling organizations to accelerate global connections that have deployed Internet-facing services.

Alibaba Cloud GA is backed by a reliable and congestion-free global network. Global Accelerator provides a high-speed and efficient network experience, with ultra-low transmission latency for users across different regions. Let’s take a look at the architectural flow of Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator on the chart below.

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How Does It Work?

Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator assigns an accelerated IP address to each acceleration region. These regions are created by splitting an acceleration area based on user interactions and network population. Users from an acceleration region can connect to the access point closest to the clients using their assigned accelerated IP address. The concept is similar to edge nodes, which ensure accelerated content delivery using a node closest to the user by geographical location.

After receiving the user requests, the access point forwards the requests over the Alibaba Cloud global network. Then, the Global Accelerator automatically selects the best routes to distribute users’ requests to the optimal endpoints. Alibaba Cloud public IP addresses are supported during this whole process. This avoids any form of network congestion and helps reduce network latency.

These endpoints can be IP addresses or domain names of some origin servers that may include:

Features and Benefits

Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator (GA) is a secure, reliable, and easily deployed acceleration service that provides high-performance and operation scalability. Alibaba Cloud GA can accelerate connections to applications and provide superior performance and high availability.

Performance and Availability

Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator utilizes the high-quality Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) bandwidth and Alibaba Cloud’s global network. GA leverages the global network infrastructure of points of presence (PoPs), enabling GA to:

  • Reduce Internet latency
  • Reduce network spikes
  • Reduce any packet loss

Alibaba Cloud GA enables you to manage network traffic routed across regions easily and seamlessly and direct it to multiple endpoints within an acceleration area. GA has unique and capable disaster recovery scenarios. GA provides remarkable service outage prevention by detecting single-region and single-line failures and directing traffic to the nearest up zone in case of a failover.

Alibaba Cloud GA continuously monitors the health status of all the endpoints and redirects network traffic as necessary to ensure service continuity. Alibaba Cloud GA implements smart scheduling features to work with the network traffic. This facilitates nearby access to Alibaba Cloud’s global network.

The nearby network access directs the user traffic to the nearest acceleration node by resolving the CNAME address or static IP address. You can expect superior performance and stability with the highly optimized TCP protocols that enhance information delivery.

Security and Deployment

Global Accelerator is integrated with Alibaba Cloud security products and ensures the safety of your application endpoints and protects your Internet services against attacks, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). Alibaba Cloud GA is easy to configure and can be deployed within a few minutes. You can enable fine-grained resource management, which is monitored and maintained in a centralized manner, enabling a simple deployment process.

Alibaba Cloud GA showcases fine-grained access control to manage and control the security policies for different levels of user access to the application. Alibaba Cloud RAM plays a significant part in identity and access management. GA also supports security protection based on blacklist and whitelist configurations.

Application Service Direct Access

Let’s compare the industry service application with and without the Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator. The first instance below is without the Global Accelerator:

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Since there is no accelerator in practice, the public network cannot control the flow of information properly, resulting in significant packet loss. Since the data is routed through multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs), significant latency is added to the transmission time, causing packet loss.

The second instance below shows the application of Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator (GA):

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Here, Alibaba Cloud Global Accelerator enables smart routing and TCP protocol optimization to provide accelerated delivery by offering low latency, better stability, availability, and no packet loss.

Continued in Part 2

In Part 2 of this 2-part series, we will discuss the usage scenarios of Global Accelerator and how it delivers crucial data with best-in-class network acceleration. We will also discuss the service interactions of Global Accelerator with other Alibaba Cloud services spanning multiple suites, such as security, dynamic content delivery, and secure delivery with HTTPS.

Upcoming Articles

  1. Seamless Network Acceleration Using GA – Part 2
  2. Maintaining Availability With Auto Scaling – Part 1
  3. Maintaining Availability With Auto Scaling – Part 2
  4. Maintaining Availability With Auto Scaling – Part 3
  5. Maintaining Availability With Auto Scaling – Part 4
  6. Multi-Tier Approach With VPC – Part 1
  7. Multi-Tier Approach With VPC – Part 2
  8. Multi-Tier Approach With VPC – Part 3
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