AWS Cache and Related Services
Amazon CloudFront
Most of the services that AWS offers are Region specific. But few services, by definition, need to be in a global scope because of the underlying service they offer. AWS IAM, Amazon CloudFront, Route 53 and WAF are some of the global services.
Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment.
You can use Amazon CloudFront to improve the performance of your website. CloudFront makes your website files (such as HTML, images, and video) available from data centers worldwide (called edge locations). When a visitor requests a file from your website, CloudFront automatically redirects the request to a copy of the file at the nearest edge location. This results in faster download times than if the visitor had requested the content from a data center that is located farther away.
Amazon CloudFront with Route 53
AWS hosts CloudFront and Route 53 services on a distributed network of proxy servers in data centers throughout the world called edge locations. Using the global Amazon network of edge locations for application delivery and DNS service plays an important part in building a comprehensive defense against DDoS attacks for your dynamic web applications.
How AWS Shield, WAF, and CloudFront with Route 53 help mitigate DDoS attacks
Global Accelerator
Suppose we have a public-facing application on AWS, for example, in a Region in Europe. We have users outside that environment who would like to connect to that application. We would like to make that experience as good as possible for those users.
AWS Global Accelerator is a network layer service that you can deploy in front of your Internet-facing applications to improve availability and performance for your globally distributed users. You deploy Global Accelerator between users on the Internet and the public-facing applications deployed and hosted on AWS. Then, the Global Accelerator allows an optimized experience for those users. In addition, it can optimize user experience both for TCP and UDP types of applications.
AWS Global Accelerator is a service that improves the availability and performance of your applications with local or global users. It provides static IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point to your application endpoints in a single or multiple AWS Regions, such as your Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, or Amazon EC2 instances. AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to optimize the path from your users to your applications, improving the performance of your traffic by as much as 60%.
AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that helps you improve the availability and performance of the applications that you offer to your global users. Global Accelerator improves performance for a wide range of applications over TCP or UDP by proxying packets at the edge to applications running in one or more AWS Regions. Global Accelerator is a good fit for non-HTTP use cases, such as gaming (UDP), IoT (MQTT), or Voice over IP, as well as for HTTP use cases that specifically require static IP addresses or deterministic, fast regional failover.
Like CloudFront, it uses AWS Global network and edge locations for enhanced performance. However, it's an overall performance enhancer than an upload speed accelerator. You cannot use Global Accelerator to speed up media file uploads into S3.
The question is: why does it matter?
Suppose we have web applications deployed on the AWS, and we have users worldwide who want to access the application. Since the traffic needed to travel to many networks or many hops, such as their ISPs and some other carriers, this is possibly impacted by Internet weather conditions. In other words, you don’t control the end-to-end experience of that user.
When you deploy AWS Global Accelerator, you bring your remote user as close as possible to the AWS backbone. And from there, the traffic will use the uncongested managed AWS backbone to the actual service running in an AWS Region.
https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator
• Global Accelerator is a good fit for non-HTTP use cases, such as gaming (UDP), IoT (MQTT), or Voice over IP, as well as for HTTP use cases that specifically require static IP addresses or deterministic, fast regional failover.
• It provides static IP addresses that provide a fixed entry point to your applications and eliminate the complexity of managing specific IP addresses for different AWS Regions and Availability Zones.
• AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront use the same edge locations.
• A regional ELB load balancer is an ideal target for AWS Global Accelerator. AWS Global Accelerator complements ELB by extending these capabilities beyond a single AWS Region, allowing you to provide a global interface for your applications in any number of Regions.
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon ElastiCache allows you to seamlessly set up, run, and scale popular open-Source compatible in-memory data stores in the cloud. Build data-intensive apps or boost the performance of your existing databases by retrieving data from high throughput and low latency in-memory data stores. Amazon ElastiCache is a popular choice for real-time use cases like Caching, Session Stores, Gaming, Geospatial Services, Real-Time Analytics, and Queuing. ElastiCache cannot be used for online analytical processing.
Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases.
If EC2 instances are intensively reading data from a database, ElastiCache can cache some values to take the load off the database.
How it works:
SK Singh is the founder, a software, cloud, and data engineer. He has been involved in the software industry for around 25 years. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from India and a master's degree in software engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. SK has been involved in a wide range of software projects for many governments, private, start-ups, and large public companies in various software engineering roles. He has many professional certifications such as AWS, Hadoop, Kafka, Oracle, Unix, Java, Java-related frameworks, and many others related.
