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简介-中国站

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:
  • EIP: If you select EIP, the custom access mode is used. You can select an access point based on your business requirements. Each access point provides a separate EIP.
  • Anycast EIP: If you select Anycast EIP, the automatic access mode is used. You do not need to specify an acceleration area. GA allocates an Anycast EIP to multiple regions across the globe.
    Note If you want to use Anycast EIPs, the GA instances and basic bandwidth plans must meet the following requirements:
    • GA instances: You must select standard GA instances whose specifications are Large Ⅰ or higher.
    • Basic bandwidth plans: You must select basic bandwidth plans whose bandwidth types are Enhanced.

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 ECS, CLB, and ALB instances as endpoints only if your Alibaba Cloud account is included in the whitelist. If you want to specify ECS, CLB, or ALB instances as endpoints for your GA instances, submit a ticket to upgrade the GA instances.
  • If you want to specify ECS instances or CLB instances as endpoints, make sure that the instances are deployed in virtual private clouds (VPCs).

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

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

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.

  • Details of time-limited one-month free trial of GA

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.

  • Details of seven-day free trial of GA