Amazon CloudFront vs. AWS Global Accelerator

When choosing the right service to optimize content delivery, cloud engineers often face a dilemma between choosing CloudFront or Global Accelerator. While both are used for content delivery, these are very different at their core.

It is important to understand the difference between these services to choose the right one based on user requirements. Before diving into the differences, let’s briefly review both services.

What is Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront is used to cache the static and dynamic web content using globally distributed AWS edge locationsEdge locations are sites strategically distributed around the world to bring services closer to end-users, thereby reducing latency and improving performance.. These edge locations are connected through the AWS global network.

For example, consider an S3 bucket that serves static website pages to users distributed globally. We can utilize Amazon CloudFront with the S3 bucket as the origin to reduce the retrieval time. CloudFront will cache the frequently accessed static web pages at the edge locations so that users close to their respective edge locations can access them in less time.

What is AWS Global Accelerator?

Amazon Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route the traffic. Since the AWS global network is redundant and congestion-free, the traffic is routed up to 60% fasthttps://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/faqs/#:~:text=AWS%20Global%20Accelerator%20chooses%20the,entry%20point%20to%20your%20applications. as compared to the internet.

For example, consider the previous scenario where content is available in an S3 Bucket. To decrease the retrieval time, we can utilize Amazon Global Accelerator. However, in this case, to quickly fetch the desired content, Global Accelerator will use the fast and optimized AWS global infrastructure to route the traffic.

Global Accelerator is commonly used for media and gaming applications that require a quick and low-latency connection to the origin web server. It uses two static Anycast IP addresses for redundancy. Unlike traditional unicast IP addresses, Anycast IP addresses can simultaneously be assigned to multiple devices or network interfaces. This unique feature allows multiple devices to share the same IP address across different locations. When the client sends a request to the IP address, Global Accelerator forwards it to the closest server.

What's the difference between CloudFront and Global Accelerator?

The main difference between Global Accelerator and CloudFront is the foundational technology. CloudFront relies on caching the content so it is readily available, while Global Accelerator optimizes the network path.

Therefore, CloudFront is usually used to cache the HTTP(s) traffic, whereas Global Accelerator is typically used to accelerate UDP, TCP, and HTTP(s) traffic.

CloudFront and Global Accelerator owe their fast speed to the AWS global network. This redundant and congestion-free network improves the speed by up to 60% compared to the internet.

The table below summarizes the main differences between CloudFront and Global Accelerator:

Use case: AWS Global Accelerator vs Amazon CloudFront

The next question is when to use which service. Let's understand this with the help of a scenario. Consider a video streaming application that wants to optimize its availability to its users. The application stores static content, such as videos and images, in an S3 bucket and runs an application to process payments on EC2 instances behind a load balancer.

When a user wants to stream a video, we can use CloudFront with the S3 bucket as the origin. CloudFront's caching capabilities will help us render the static content in less time.

Similarly, while making payments, we can leverage the power of the AWS Global accelerator to help users quickly establish a connection with the web server hosted on EC2 instances.

Choose the best

We understand AWS services better with use cases. Solve the quiz below to know if you can choose the right service for the most common use cases.

Conclusion

Both Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator services have distinct strengths tailored to specific use cases. Amazon CloudFront is an ideal choice for delivering content with low latency and high transfer speeds by leveraging a global network of edge locations. Conversely, AWS Global Accelerator excels in providing consistent, fast, and highly available network performance by routing user traffic through the AWS global network infrastructure.