AWS Global Accelerator Now Supports EC2 Instance Endpoints

Posted on: Oct 29, 2019

We are pleased to announce that starting today, your applications running on Amazon EC2 instances can be directly fronted by AWS Global Accelerator. Before, you needed to use an Elastic IP address to front an EC2 instance with Global Accelerator. Now, you can use Global Accelerator directly as your single internet-facing access point for your EC2 instances, improving availability and performance of applications with local or global users. You can also use Application Load Balancers or Network Load Balancers in conjunction with Global Accelerator to connect to your EC2 instances.

To front an EC2 instance with Global Accelerator, you simply create an accelerator and add the EC2 instance as an endpoint using the EC2 instance ID. To control what internet traffic reaches your EC2 instance, we recommend you use security groups in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Additionally, Global Accelerator preserves the source IP address of the client all the way to the EC2 instance, which enables you to apply client-specific logic and serve personalized content for your TCP and UDP applications.

We are also pleased to announce that Global Accelerator now automatically creates two fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) A records and two pointer (PTR) records for each newly-created accelerator. These records have been generated for your existing accelerators as well. Until now, you had to create Domain Name System (DNS) entries manually. Now, Global Accelerator automatically generates DNS entries for you to use with Amazon Route 53 or with the DNS provider of your choice. Furthermore, to route custom domain traffic to your accelerator you can create Route 53 alias records.

There are no additional Global Accelerator charges for either EC2 instance support or DNS aliasing support. EC2 instance endpoints are supported in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) AWS Regions.

To learn more about Global Accelerator supporting EC2 instance endpoints, please visit the Global Accelerator product page, Endpoints in AWS Global Accelerator documentation, and Support for DNS Addressing in Global Accelerator documentation.