Global Accelerator vs CloudFront: Choosing Correctly

~10 min read

A direct comparison to resolve the most common exam and design confusion between AWS's two global traffic services.

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Key points

  • CloudFront caches HTTP/S content at the edge; Global Accelerator caches nothing, it optimizes network routing
  • Global Accelerator supports TCP/UDP broadly; CloudFront is HTTP/S only
  • Global Accelerator's static IPs give faster, DNS-independent failover than CloudFront/Route 53 approaches
  • Default to CloudFront for cacheable content; use Global Accelerator for dynamic, non-cacheable, or non-HTTP traffic