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.

GA provides different types of accelerated IP addresses based on the access mode required by your business. The following types of accelerated IP addresses are supported: Elastic IP Address (EIP) and Anycast EIP. Clients can connect to the nearest access point of the Alibaba Cloud global transmission network by sending requests to the accelerated IP address. GA then automatically selects routes to distribute client requests to the optimal endpoints. This helps avoid network congestion and reduce network latency. You can specify Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, Classic Load Balancer (CLB) instances, Application Load Balancer (ALB) instances, Object Storage Service (OSS) buckets, Alibaba Cloud public IP addresses, custom IP addresses of origin servers, or custom domain names of origin servers as the endpoints of GA.
Components
Component | Description |
---|---|
Acceleration area | The area where you want to accelerate content delivery. The following acceleration
areas are supported: China North, China South, China East, China Southwest, Asia Pacific,
Europe, North America, South America, and Middle East.
You can also specify regions in each acceleration area. For more information about areas and regions, see Overview. |
Accelerated IP address | Clients can connect to the nearest access point of the Alibaba Cloud global transmission
network by sending requests to the accelerated IP address. GA provides the following
types of accelerated IP addresses:
For more information, see Accelerated IP address. |
Access point | An access point serves as an ingress through which network traffic is routed to Alibaba
Cloud. Each access point is a point of presence (PoP) node or a region of Alibaba
Cloud.
Access points that are supported by Anycast EIPs are used to accelerate content delivery
in regions outside the Chinese mainland. For more information, see Access point locations.
Note Access points that are supported by Anycast EIPs are only for reference. Alibaba Cloud
may update the access point information without sending notifications to you. Alibaba
Cloud may update the access point information when a specific event occurs. For example,
Alibaba Cloud updates the information when an access device is under maintenance,
an access device fails, a new access point is added, or an existing access point is
removed.
|
CNAME | After a GA instance is created, the system assigns a canonical name (CNAME) to the GA instance. To use GA to accelerate multiple domain names, you must configure intelligent DNS resolution for the origin server and map the domain name that you want to accelerate to the CNAME allocated by GA. |
Listener | A listener listens for connection requests and distributes the requests to endpoints based on the port and protocol that you specify. Each listener is associated with an endpoint group. You can associate an endpoint group with a listener by specifying the region to which you want to distribute network traffic. After you associate an endpoint group with a listener, network traffic is distributed to the optimal endpoints in the endpoint group. |
Endpoint group | After you add a listener, you must create an endpoint group for the listener. This way, network traffic can be distributed to the endpoint group. Each endpoint group is associated with a specific region. An endpoint group contains one or more endpoints in the associated region. |
Endpoint | Endpoints are destinations of client requests. You can specify Alibaba Cloud public
IP addresses, OSS buckets, ECS instances, CLB instances, ALB instances, custom IP
addresses of origin servers, or custom domain names of origin servers as endpoints.
Note
You can specify a weight for each endpoint. The weight specifies the proportion of traffic that is forwarded to the endpoint. |
Endpoint group IP address | After you add endpoints to an endpoint group, GA allocates at least four endpoint
group IP addresses to each endpoint. You can view the actual number of endpoint group
IP addresses allocated to each endpoint in the console. After GA receives a client
request, GA converts the client IP address to an endpoint group IP address that is
used to access the specific endpoint.
Note The IP addresses of endpoint groups associated with each GA instance are dedicated
to the instance owner and are not shared with other GA users.
|
Basic bandwidth plan | A basic bandwidth plan provides bandwidth for data transfer over the Internet and
within internal networks of Alibaba Cloud. However, basic bandwidth plans are not
applicable to data transfer between the Chinese mainland and areas outside the Chinese
mainland.
The following types of basic bandwidth plans are supported: basic, enhanced, and premium. The resources, acceleration type, and acceleration scope vary based on the bandwidth type. For more information, see Overview. |
Benefits
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High performanceGA 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.
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High availabilityGA 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.
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Security and reliabilityGA allows you to set network access control lists (ACLs) and use Alibaba Cloud security services to protect applications and endpoints from attacks.
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Ease of deploymentGA 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
Time-limited one-month free trial of GA
- Details of time-limited one-month free trial of GA
GA instances and basic bandwidth plans of specific specifications are free of charge for the first month. Free trials are available from 00:00:00 (UTC+8) on April 1, 2021 to 00:00:00 (UTC+8) on April 1, 2023.
Seven-day free trial of GA
- Details of seven-day free trial of GA
To get started with the free trial, you need to only enter the business information. Then, the system automatically creates a trial GA instance. You can own at most five trial GA instances. Starting 00:00:00 (UTC+8) on June 13, 2022, you can apply for a seven-day GA free trial.