Accelerating Access to Global Servers from China Using Global Acceleration

By Victor Mak, Solutions Architect

In some cases, a customer may have some limitations to migrate all of their resources to a specific cloud provider. For example, if the customer has deployed a hybrid cloud environment, the customer may host certain core services on his or her on-premises data center. It could also be the case that customers may have subscribed services from multiple service providers, such as having a multi cloud environment hosted in Alibaba Cloud, AWS, and Azure.

If the connection is across different regions, network latency and interruptions may occur. In this case, Alibaba Cloud provides the Global Acceleration (GA) service and reverse proxy to help customers improve the stability and reliability of traffic flow between China and overseas.

What Is Global Acceleration?

Global Acceleration is a network acceleration product built based on Alibaba Cloud’s network. Global Acceleration uses access points globally to speed up Internet access for users to services hosted in different regions. It reduces the impact of network issues like latency, jitters, and packet loss on service, and provides a superior experience for global service users. The benefits using GA are:

1. Elastic Binding: You can bind a backend service to a Global Acceleration instance to accelerate the Internet access, and unbind that backend service whenever the Internet acceleration is no longer required.
2. Configurable Network Capabilities: You can adjust the bandwidth of a Global Acceleration instances based on your business needs. Changes take effect in real time.

In this article, we will show you how to use Alibaba Cloud Global Acceleration to speed up access to overseas servers from China. We will be connecting a service hosted on an AWS server in Singapore to an Alibaba Cloud server in Shenzhen.

Solution Architecture and Resource Provisioning

Referring to the above architecture diagram, this article will use the following resource configurations:

A simple date time function simulate SaaS services hosted in AWS (SG) with Lambda

1. Lambda testing URL (https://hniust8de4.execute-api.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/default/time) will return current date time

Alibaba Cloud Singapore region reserved proxy

1. 1 x ECS with minimum requirement 1 vCPU and 1 GB Memories

Alibaba Cloud ShenZhen region Global Acceleration Instance

1. Service Area: Singapore
2. Acceleration Area: ShenZhen
3. Bandwidth: 10Mbps

Alibaba Cloud ShenZhen region testing client

1. 1 x ECS with minimum requirement 1 vCPU and 1 GB Memories

Configure Nginx Reverse Proxy

Let’s assume that we have an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance ready at Singapore region with Nginx installed. If you are not sure how to do so, read the official guide here https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/50700.htm.

To configure Nginx reverse proxy, modify the yellow parts under Nginx server section:

server {
        listen       80 default_server;
        listen       [::]:80 default_server;
        server_name  _;
        root         /usr/share/nginx/html;
        # Load configuration files for the default server block.
        include /etc/nginx/default.d/*.conf;
        location /default/ {
          proxy_buffering         off;
          proxy_pass      https://hniust8de4.execute-api.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/default/;
        }
        error_page 404 /404.html;
            location = /40x.html {
        }
        error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
            location = /50x.html {
        }
    }

Configure Global Acceleration

Subscribe to Global Acceleration Instance

Go to the Global Acceleration console under VPC section.

Create an Instance with the below configuration:

1. Bandwidth Type: Dedicated Bandwidth
2. Acceleration Area: Mainland China
3. Region: China (ShenZhen)
4. Service Area: Asia Pacific
5. Peak Bandwidth: 10 Mbit/s

After purchasing the Global Acceleration instance, the instance will show in the Global Acceleration console:

Bind GA to your ECS Instance located in Singapore:

Bind the Backend Service IP Address to ECS sub interface:

If you are not sure how to do this, read the official documentation: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/65196.htm

Log on to the ECS instance and run the following command to open the NIC configuration file:

sudo vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:1

Add the following configurations to the configuration file:

DEVICE=eth0:1
IPADDR=192.168.0.214
NETMASK=255.255.255.255
ONBOOT=yes

Run the following command to enable the NIC sub interface:

ifup eth0:1

Set Up a Testing Client in SZ with curl Installed

Create an ECS instance in Shenzhen region with the following configurations. When deploying services within Mainland China, you will need to complete real name registration if you haven’t done so already.

Test Network Connectivity

Verify the end to end network connectivity by:

1. Access AWS SaaS platform via Global Acceleration Instance IP
2. Compare the speed between AWS endpoint and Alibaba GA

Accessing AWS SaaS Platform via Global Acceleration Instance IP

Comparing the Speed between AWS Endpoint and Alibaba Cloud GA

The result shows that the connection with Alibaba Cloud GA is 0.189ms while the direct connection to the AWS endpoint is 0.442ms. That means we have sped up the connection more than 2 times compared with direct access to the AWS endpoint.

To learn more about Alibaba Cloud Global Acceleration, visit https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/global-acceleration

Reference:https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/accelerating-access-to-global-servers-from-china-using-global-acceleration_594423?spm=a2c41.12541365.0.0