Service comparisons / Amazon CloudFront vs AWS Global Accelerator
CloudFront vs Global Accelerator
Amazon CloudFront caches HTTP content at edge locations; AWS Global Accelerator gives two static anycast IPs and routes TCP and UDP traffic over the AWS network to the healthiest Regional endpoint. When to use each.
Last checked against AWS documentation · How we write our content
| Question | Amazon CloudFront | AWS Global Accelerator |
|---|---|---|
| Use it when | Web content and APIs over HTTP(S) should be served and cached close to users | Non-HTTP traffic, static IPs, or fast multi-Region failover is needed |
| Caching | Yes, at hundreds of edge locations | No caching; every request reaches your endpoint |
| Protocols | HTTP, HTTPS and WebSockets | Any TCP or UDP |
| IP addresses | Changing edge IPs behind a DNS name | Two static anycast IP addresses |
| Failover | Origin failover to a secondary origin | Health-checked routing across Regions, usually within seconds |
| Extras | AWS WAF, signed URLs and cookies, CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge | Client affinity, traffic dials and weights per endpoint |
Both use the AWS edge network to speed up global users, so they’re easy to confuse. CloudFront is a content delivery network that caches content. Global Accelerator is a network-layer service that gets traffic onto the AWS backbone sooner and keeps the IP addresses fixed.
How to choose
- Static website, images, video, downloads, or a cacheable API: CloudFront.
- Multiplayer gaming over UDP, IoT, VoIP, or any TCP or UDP app: Global Accelerator.
- “Customers’ firewalls must allowlist our IP addresses”: Global Accelerator’s two static IPs.
- Active-active or active-passive across Regions, with failover faster than DNS caching allows: Global Accelerator.
Exam traps
- Route 53 failover depends on DNS TTLs and client caching. Global Accelerator fails over without clients changing anything.
- To keep users from bypassing CloudFront, restrict the origin: origin access control for S3, and a VPC origin or the CloudFront managed prefix list for an ALB.
- CloudFront also speeds up dynamic, uncached content by reusing connections over the AWS network, so “dynamic” alone doesn’t rule it out.