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Dynamic Content Delivery Network:What is IP Application Accelerator?

Last Updated:Aug 25, 2023

IP Application Accelerator (IPA) is an acceleration feature that is developed by Alibaba Cloud. IPA provides Layer 4 acceleration for traffic over TCP and UDP. IPA accelerates data transmission over networks, reduces latency, and improves the accessibility of applications for customers in social, gaming, education, and financial industries.

Overview

IPA provides reliable low-latency transmission over TCP or UDP. IPA can solve the problems of high latency and service instability issues that are caused by factors such as network instability across Internet service providers (ISPs), single back-to-origin route, traffic spikes, or network congestion, and improve transmission performance and user experience. You can also use a custom transmission protocol and port for acceleration without the additional configurations for IPA. If you want to use IPA, submit a ticket. Only enterprise users can use IPA.

Benefits

IPA provides highly reliable, low latency network connections and supports the use of custom ports and protocols.

  • High reliability: Customers in remote areas can obtain highly reliable network services. This reduces network interruptions and improves user experience.

  • Low latency: IPA makes use of the wide distribution of highly optimized points of presence (POPs) to provide nearby access points for devices.

  • Custom ports and protocols: You can make use of custom ports and protocols to improve service experience and reliability.

Scenarios

IPA can be used when you want to:

  • Improve network performance and reliability for services that listen to ports other than 80 and 443.

  • Implement acceleration without deploying certificates on Alibaba Cloud CDN or DCDN for services delivered over HTTPS.

  • Use custom private protocols, such as the signaling protocol used for gaming and online education.

  • Further improve the performance of the first packet of dynamic service data.

  • Accelerate your enterprise office services, such as SSL-VPN.

  • Accelerate your services, for example, to improve the reliability and performance of SaaS services and enterprise networking by integrating IPA into your services.

  • Improve the efficiency and reliability of your audio and video transmission.

Key features

Key feature

Description

Accelerated region

Acceleration regions are regions where acceleration is required. An acceleration region can be set to Chinese mainland, outside the Chinese mainland, and worldwide. If you want to set the acceleration region to regions outside the Chinese mainland or worldwide, submit a ticket. Origin servers can be deployed anywhere in the world. The following list provides information about the use scenarios for different acceleration regions:

  • Chinese mainland: Accelerate access to origin servers in the Chinese mainland from devices within the Chinese mainland.

  • Outside the Chinese mainland: Accelerate access to origin servers outside the Chinese mainland from devices outside the Chinese mainland.

  • Worldwide: Accelerate access to origin servers all over the world from devices all over the world.

Acceleration protocol

TCP or UDP

Acceleration port

You can use custom acceleration ports. Take note of the following items:

  • The following ports are not supported:

    22, 123, 161, 162, 179, 830, 2049, 2601, 2605, 3389, 5049, 7547, 8082, 8087, 8182, 8888, 9998, 15772, 15776, 15778, 15779, 18053, 18098, 18099, 18888, 19313, 19777, and 56667.

  • Ports 80 and 443 are available only to users whose IPA bandwidth exceeds 500 Mbit/s. If your IPA bandwidth meets the requirement, submit a ticket.

Source IP address passthrough

IPA allows you to use the TCP Option Address (TOA) or PROXY protocol to pass client IP addresses to origin servers.

  • TOA

    The TOA kernel module inserts the source IP address of a client into the option field. Before you use this method, make sure that the origin server has the TOA kernel module installed. No modifications are required for the application.

  • Proxy Protocol

    The PROXY protocol inserts the source IP address of a client into the TCP payload. By default, the PROXY protocol is supported by the open source versions of NGINX. For other applications on the origin server, make sure that the PROXY protocol is supported.

High availability

Load balancing and automatic disaster recovery switchover across origin servers are supported to achieve high availability.

Limits

The IP addresses that are provided by IPA are shared. That is, the IP address of a POP is shared by your domain name and domain names of other customers. Services of different customers are distributed to different ports. For example, when a user accesses IP1:8084, the user reaches the service of customer A. When a user accesses IP1:8086, the user reaches the service of another customer.

If you want to use an exclusive IP address, submit a ticket.

Use cases

IPA provides reliable and low-latency services for enterprises in multiple industries, such as gaming, education, social networking, and IoT.

Billing

For more information, visit the DCDN pricing page.