Leveraging IP Anycast with AWS Global Accelerator

In Chapter 2, we discussed how the primary causes of packet loss on the internet are congestion or throttling at the junction of two autonomous systems along the way:

Figure 8.15 – A client in Dallas, USA, accessing an application in Stockholm, SE, via the public internet

Let’s think about an application that runs on an EC2 instance in the AWS region in Stockholm, SE. The preceding figure provides an example of the path such a connection might take from a client in Dallas, USA.

As you can see, four different autonomous systems are traversed before the packets enter the AWS network in Stockholm. This is a lot of opportunity for congestion or QoS throttling mechanisms to cause a poor user experience.

Now, let’s look at the same application, but this time with AWS Global Accelerator configured in front of it. Yes, the client in Dallas still has to physically get to Stockholm, so...