AWS CloudFront vs Global Accelerator for Dynamic contents

Question

What is the difference between CloudFront and Global Accelerator when we want to serve dynamic contents?

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/dynamic-content/

I expect that CloudFront is CDN, so it is used for static files such as images and videos. However, this webpage above says CloudFront can be used for dynamic contents too. Therefore, no cache will be used and every time CloudFront asks the origin server (e.g. ALB) for new contents. Obviously, clients access edge locations, so responses will be faster than accessing directly to ALB.

https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/

On the other hand, Global Accelerator is a service to let clients access edge locations and make response time shorter.

I don't really see the difference between these two in the context of dynamic contents. Could anyone explain this?

Talishatalisman

Answer 1

Please check Global Accelerator FAQs for how is Global Accelerator different from CloudFront.

I use Global Accelerator to route traffic across regions to mitigate endpoint failures. You cannot achieve this using CloudFront alone.

Silici

The Global Accelerator FAQs no longer mention Cloudfront. – Mel

Answer 2

AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront are separate services that use the AWS global network and its edge locations around the world. CloudFront improves performance for both cacheable content (such as images and videos) and dynamic content (such as API acceleration and dynamic site delivery). 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. Both services integrate with AWS Shield for DDoS protection.

Ashlan

Answer 3

	Cloud Front	Global Accelerator
Purpose	Shorter Latency, Security, Content Caching	Shorter Latency, High Availability, IP Caching
Underlined mechanism	Cache the content to a location near the customer/client.	Find a optimal way to reach to the host from where the content will delivered. Note here content is not being cached like CDN.
Use case	HTTP, HTTPS based traffic. Suitable for caching static resources like images, videos.	Both HTTP & Non HTTP protocols like TCP, UDP for Gaming, Video streaming, IoT Messaging
How is it charged	Based on numbers of HTTP requests along with amount of data transferred.	Hourly charges along with amount of data transferred
Static IP	You can not assign static IP to Cloud Front distribution node. Your client will see non deterministic end points for your application	Global Accelerator assign fixed number of Anycast static IPs. So the client can determine the possible IP addresses of the end points
Network Used	Amazon Backbone Network	Amazon Backbone Network

Meijer