IP Application Accelerator (IPA) is an acceleration feature that is offered by Alibaba Cloud DCDN. IPA provides high-performance Layer 4 acceleration for traffic over TCP and UDP. It ensures low latency and high service stability for real-time interactions such as messaging in social media, data synchronization in online gaming, online education, and financial transactions.
Overview
IPA provides reliable, low-latency transmission over TCP or UDP. It resolves issues such as high latency and unstable services caused by unstable networks across Internet service providers (ISPs), single-line communications with the origin, traffic surges, or network congestion, and thereby improves 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. This feature is available to only enterprise users.
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 highly optimized POPs distributed across the globe to provide nearby access for clients
Custom ports and protocols: You can configure 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 proprietary 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 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 |
Service location | Service locations are regions where acceleration is required. A service location can be set to Chinese Mainland Only, Global, and Global (Excluding the Chinese Mainland). If you want to set the location to regions outside the Chinese mainland or global, submit a ticket. Origin servers can be deployed anywhere in the world. The following list provides information about the use scenarios for different service locations:
|
Acceleration protocol | TCP or UDP |
Acceleration port | You can use custom acceleration ports. Take note of the following items:
|
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.
|
High availability | Load balancing and automatic failover across origin servers are supported to achieve high availability. |
Limits
The IP addresses that are provided by IPA are shared. This means 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.
Use cases
IPA provides reliable and low-latency services for enterprises in multiple industries, such as gaming, education, social networking, and IoT.
Billing
For information about IPA billing, visit the