Global Accelerator: two static IPs, one fast path
Global Accelerator provides two static anycast IPs that route any TCP/UDP traffic onto AWS's backbone at the nearest edge, with fast health-check-based failover, unlike CloudFront's HTTP-only caching model.
Speaker notes
- Global Accelerator provides two static anycast IPv4 addresses; a user's traffic enters AWS's network at whichever edge location is geographically nearest to them, then travels across AWS's own backbone (not the public internet) to your actual endpoint group, which can span multiple Regions.
- Unlike CloudFront, Global Accelerator works with any TCP or UDP traffic, not just HTTP(S): it doesn't inspect headers, doesn't cache, and doesn't transform anything, it purely finds a faster network path and provides fast, health-check-driven failover between endpoint groups in different Regions.
- This makes it the right tool specifically for non-HTTP, latency-sensitive traffic: gaming servers (UDP), VoIP, IoT device fleets using MQTT, anything where CloudFront's HTTP-only caching model provides zero benefit but a faster, more reliable network path still matters. Many real architectures run both together: CloudFront for cacheable HTTP content, Global Accelerator routing the dynamic, non-cacheable requests to the fastest healthy backend.
Deck map
01
AWS Networking, end to end
02
The certification landscape: Associate to Professional to Specialty
03
The VPC is the network; everything else attaches to it
04
A subnet lives in exactly one AZ, and that's the whole point
05
The route table decides, the resource doesn't
06
An Internet Gateway makes a subnet public, nothing else does
07
NAT Gateway vs. NAT Instance: managed reliability vs. control
08
Security Groups are stateful, and that's the whole trick
09
Two firewalls, two layers, evaluated in a fixed order
10
Elastic IPs and ENIs: identity that outlives the instance
11
VPC Peering is direct, private, and never transitive
12
Gateway endpoints are free; interface endpoints are PrivateLink
13
ALB, NLB, and Gateway Load Balancer solve different problems
14
Six routing policies, one DNS service
15
CloudFront optimizes what's delivered, not how it travels
16
Shield, WAF, and the edge defense stack
17
VPC Flow Logs: the record of what actually happened
18
Transit Gateway: from N-squared peering to one hub
19
Direct Connect: a physical circuit, not a tunnel
20
Direct Connect resiliency is a model you choose, not a default
21
Direct Connect Gateway: one circuit, many regions
22
Site-to-Site VPN and Client VPN solve different connectivity problems
23
Choosing hybrid connectivity: bandwidth vs. lead time vs. cost
24
Cloud WAN: the network becomes a policy document
25
VPC sharing: one network, many accounts
26
PrivateLink: a service exposed as an ENI, nothing more
27
VPC Lattice moves service networking up to Layer 7
28
PrivateLink vs. VPC Lattice vs. Transit Gateway: the 2026 pattern
29
Route 53 Resolver: DNS that crosses the on-premises boundary
30
Five layers deep: NACL to Shield Advanced
31
Global Accelerator: two static IPs, one fast path
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Three tools that answer 'why can't this reach that'
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IPv6 in AWS is additive, not a migration
34
Bandwidth is a design decision, not a given
35
Scenario: a global SaaS platform's hub-and-spoke backbone
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Scenario: a trading platform's latency and compliance walls
37
Scenario: merging two companies' networks without an outage
38
Scenario: a network that survives losing a region
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Scenario: exiting a data center without a hard cutover
40
The Advanced Networking Specialty exam, domain by domain
41
The traps that recur across every certification level
42
Quick-fire recall
43
The one-page decision cheat sheet
44
Readiness checklist: is this network actually enterprise-grade?