Global Accelerator (GA) uses stable Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) lines and the congestion-free global network of Alibaba Cloud to accelerate Internet-facing applications. GA can reduce network latency, network jitters, and packet loss when your business system is deployed across regions for global users. Users can access your business system by connecting to the nearest access points worldwide. GA ensures the high availability and high performance of web applications.

Types of GA instances

Standard GA instances

Standard GA instances support multiple access modes and provide end-to-end acceleration services to improve performance for applications that are used by a global audience.

Standard GA instancesAccess modes
Standard GA instances allow you to accelerate access through an accelerated IP address or a CNAME. When a client connects to an accelerated IP address or CNAME, its traffic is routed to the nearest access point of the Alibaba Cloud global transmission network.
  • Accelerated IP address
    • Elastic IP address (EIP): GA provides separate EIPs based on acceleration regions. Users in each acceleration region can connect to GA through region-specific EIPs.
    • Anycast EIP: Users in multiple regions can connect to GA through a static IP address.
  • CNAME

    The DNS of the domain name that you want to accelerate is configured to point to the CNAME that is allocated by GA. This accelerates access to the backend service.

Acceleration network

Standard GA instances connect users in different acceleration regions to origin servers that are deployed in different regions and provide acceleration services at Layer 4 (TCP and UDP protocols) and Layer 7 (HTTP and HTTPS protocols).

After GA receives client requests, GA forwards the client requests to the backend services based on the routing type of the listener to avoid network congestion and reduce latency and network jitter.

Origin server connection
The following network connections are supported when GA forwards client requests to backend services:
  • Private network: This network connection is used for backend services that are deployed on Alibaba Cloud. You can specify Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, Classic Load Balancer (CLB) instances, Application Load Balancer (ALB) instances, Object Storage Service (OSS) buckets, and vSwitches as the endpoints. This prevents backend services from being exposed to the Internet and ensures the security of network connections.
  • Internet: This network connection is used for backend services that are deployed outside Alibaba Cloud, including services that are deployed on on-premises data centers, and backend service types that are not supported by Alibaba Cloud. You can specify custom IP addresses and custom domain names as endpoints. For example, you can specify the CNAME of Web Application Firewall (WAF) as the custom domain name. WAF detects and filters malicious requests based on the protection policies that you configure and forwards valid requests to the origin server. This ensures the security of your services.

Basic GA instances

Basic GA instances use the high-quality global network bandwidth and transmission network of Alibaba Cloud to provide point-to-point acceleration services.

Basic GA instancesAccess modes

You can use only accelerated IP addresses to connect to basic GA instances. The types of the accelerated IP addresses must be EIP. Clients can connect to the access point of the Alibaba Cloud global transmission network by sending requests to the accelerated IP addresses.

Acceleration network

Basic GA instances provide acceleration services between the acceleration region and the region where the origin server is deployed. Basic GA instances provide acceleration services at only Layer 3 (IP protocols).

Origin server connection

GA forwards client requests to backend services over private network connections. You can specify internal-facing CLB instances, secondary elastic network interfaces (ENIs), and ECS instances as endpoints.

Benefits

  • High performance

    GA uses stable BGP lines, the global transmission network of Alibaba Cloud, and worldwide access points to reduce network latency, network jitters, and packet loss. This greatly improves user experience.

  • High availability

    GA allows you to manage network traffic that is routed across regions and distributed to endpoints. This prevents service disruptions caused by failures of individual regions or connections and improves network stability.

    GA continuously monitors the health status of all endpoints and automatically schedules network traffic to ensure service continuity.

  • High reliability

    GA allows you to set network access control lists (ACLs) and use Alibaba Cloud security services to protect applications and endpoints from attacks.

  • Easy deployment

    GA is easy to configure and can be deployed within a few minutes. Resources are monitored and maintained in a centralized manner. This mechanism simplifies the deployment process.

Free trials

GA instances and basic bandwidth plans of specific specifications are free of charge for the first month. You can apply for the one-month free trial before 00:00:00 (UTC+8) on April 1, 2024.

For more information about the free trial and the supported instance types, see Time-limited one-month free trials of GA.