How do customers benefit from using AWS Global Accelerator? | How to launch Linux OS from EC2 with GUI???

AWS Global Accelerator can Supercharge Your Applications

For businesses that operate globally, connectivity is key. Whether you're serving customers in different regions or collaborating with remote teams, you need a fast, reliable, and secure network that can keep up with your demands. That's where AWS Global Accelerator comes in – a service designed to optimize your network performance and improve the end-user experience. In this article, we'll explore AWS Global Accelerator and how it has improved the past, enhanced the present, and is shaping the future of customer connectivity.

If you're running applications or services on AWS, you know how crucial it is to deliver a fast and reliable experience to your users around the world. Traditional methods like DNS routing or using multiple regions can be time-consuming and costly, and may not always provide the best results. Let's get started on exploring how AWS Global Accelerator works, its benefits, and how you can get started with it...

What is AWS Global Accelerator?

AWS Global Accelerator is a service that uses the AWS global network to improve the availability and performance of your applications. It works by providing static IP addresses that you can associate with your application endpoints (such as EC2 instances or Elastic IP addresses). Traffic is then directed to these endpoints using anycast routing, which automatically routes traffic to the optimal endpoint based on network conditions. This helps reduce latency and improves availability by automatically routing traffic away from any unhealthy endpoints.

How does AWS Global Accelerator work?

AWS Global Accelerator is designed to work with a variety of AWS services, including EC2 instances, Network Load Balancers, and Application Load Balancers. You can configure endpoint groups, which specify the endpoints that you want to include in the accelerator. You can also specify endpoint weights, which determine the proportion of traffic that is directed to each endpoint. AWS Global Accelerator uses health checks to monitor the health of your endpoints and automatically reroutes traffic away from any unhealthy endpoints.

What are the benefits of using AWS Global Accelerator?

Using AWS Global Accelerator can bring a number of benefits to your applications, including:

• Improved performance: By using anycast routing and the AWS global network, AWS Global Accelerator can help reduce latency and improve the end-user experience.
• Increased availability: AWS Global Accelerator automatically routes traffic away from unhealthy endpoints, helping to ensure that your applications are always available.
• Simplified management: With AWS Global Accelerator, you can manage your application endpoints from a single console, making it easier to configure and monitor your network performance.
• Cost savings: By optimizing network performance and reducing the need for multiple regions or DNS routing, AWS Global Accelerator can help you save money on network costs.

In the past, businesses had to rely on traditional networking solutions, such as VPNs and load balancers, to connect to their customers and partners. However, these solutions often suffered from slow speeds, limited scalability, and lack of global reach. As a result, businesses had to invest in expensive and complex infrastructure to maintain their global connectivity.

With the introduction of AWS Global Accelerator, businesses now have a simple and effective solution to improve their network performance and reliability. AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route traffic over the fastest available path, minimizing latency and improving application availability. Additionally, AWS Global Accelerator provides automatic failover to improve the resilience of your applications. These features enable businesses to improve their customer experience and reduce the risk of downtime.

Looking to the future, AWS Global Accelerator is poised to shape the way businesses connect and collaborate in a globalized world. As more and more businesses adopt a digital-first approach, the demand for fast and secure connectivity will only increase. AWS Global Accelerator is constantly evolving to meet these demands, offering new features and capabilities to enhance the customer experience. For example, AWS Global Accelerator recently introduced support for client affinity, which allows businesses to route traffic based on the source IP address. This feature improves the user experience by maintaining session persistence across multiple applications.

How can you get started with AWS Global Accelerator?

To get started with AWS Global Accelerator, you'll need an AWS account and some knowledge of how to configure and manage AWS services. You can create an accelerator in the AWS Management Console, specify the endpoints that you want to include, and configure endpoint weights and health checks. Once you've configured your accelerator, you can start directing traffic to it using DNS or using a static IP address.

Are you willing to know how do customers benefit from using AWS Global Accelerator?. Let's go through the below case study

Atlassian Reduces Bitbucket Response Times by up to 45% on AWS: A Case Study

Atlassian is a leading enterprise software company that offers a wide range of tools for agile project management, code collaboration, and software development. One of their flagship products is Bitbucket, a web-based hosting service for version control and collaboration. In early 2020, Atlassian, the Australian software company, recognized an opportunity to better serve the users of its code-management service, Bitbucket. The company wanted to improve performance, reliability, and overall user experience by reducing latency and network-related support cases, as well as minimizing friction and uncertainty from its network.

To achieve these goals, Atlassian turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which offered a global network infrastructure that could help move internet traffic efficiently without requiring costly, time-consuming changes to the Bitbucket application. Atlassian chose to utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) Global Accelerator, a powerful networking service that routes user traffic through AWS's global infrastructure, resulting in a performance improvement of up to 60%.

By bringing Bitbucket's edge closer to users, AWS Global Accelerator enabled Atlassian to overcome potential problems created by internet service provider (ISP) hops, resulting in more reliable and faster application performance. Overall, Atlassian's use of AWS Global Accelerator represents a smart, strategic decision that has helped improve the experience for Bitbucket users around the world.

Benefits of AWS

? Reduced response times by up to 45%

? Lowered average response time by 500 ms

? Produced 100% improvement in download speed for some users

? Saw 20% application performance improvement from two engineers’ work in 1 month

? Brings edge location closer to users and reduces ISP hops

? Supports IP-allow lists through static anycast IP addresses

? Enables developers to use code faster

Isn't Global Accelerator really awesome?

AWS Global Accelerator is a powerful solution for businesses that want to improve their global connectivity. By leveraging the AWS global network, businesses can enhance their network performance and reliability, improve the customer experience, increase availability, simplify management, save costs, and reduce the risk of downtime. As the world becomes more interconnected, AWS Global Accelerator will continue to evolve to meet the demands of the modern business landscape. It's an excellent way to ensure that your users get the best experience possible, regardless of their location or device. So, what are you waiting for? Start accelerating your applications with AWS Global Accelerator today!

Now, let's dive into another topic of discussion on launching Linux OS from EC2 instance with GUI

Interacting with your EC2 instance using command line tools such as PUTTY or browser-based CLIs is often sufficient, and a GUI is not always necessary. However, if you do require a GUI to interact with your EC2 instance, you can follow the steps below to install one.

Installing the GUI

• Confirm your Linux OS, update the packages on your instance, and reboot it.

grep PRETTY_NAME /etc/os-release
# Provides PRETTY_NAME = "Amazon Linux 2"
sudo yum update
sudo reboot        

Install the MATE desktop environment

• Install the MATE packages

sudo amazon-linux-extras install mate-desktop1.x        

• Define MATE as your default desktop

sudo bash -c 'echo PREFERRED=/usr/bin/mate-session > /etc/sysconfig/desktop'
# MATE for (ec2-user) at present
echo "/usr/bin/mate-session" > ~/.Xclients && chmod +x ~/.Xclients        

Install TigerVNC

• Install TigerVNC packages

sudo yum install tigervnc-server        

• Configure a VNC password (6 to 8 characters)

Remember this password as it will be required later to connect to the instance. If prompted to enter a view-only password, simply press "n".

vncpasswd        

For security reasons, restrict VNC network access to localhost. Make it accessible only by means of a tunnel

• Create a configuration directory for tigerVNC

sudo mkdir /etc/tigervnc        

• Create a mandatory configuration file with a localhost option

sudo bash -c 'echo localhost > /etc/tigervnc/vncserver-config-mandatory'        

• Start tigerVNC. The server starts automatically at boot time
• Create a systemd unit from an existing template

sudo cp /lib/systemd/system/[email protected] /etc/systemd/system/[email protected]        

• Replace all occurrences of “user” in the sed with “ec2-user”

sudo sed -i 's/<USER>/ec2-user/' /etc/systemd/system/[email protected]        

• Reload the systemd manager configuration

sudo systemctl daemon-reload        

• Enable and start the service

# Enable the service
sudo systemctl enable vncserver@:1
# Start the service
sudo systemctl start vncserver@:1        

• Install TigerVNC on your local machine

Connect to the Instance

• Create a secure tunnel. For this tutorial, we will use PUTTY
• Open PUTTY, and click on the profile you are using to connect to the instance. Check Assumption 2 above
• On the category, Click on SSH, then Tunnels
• In the source port field, Enter 5901
• In the Destination field, Enter localhost:5901
• Click on Add
• Copy your instance’s .pem from your local machine to your instance and note the path
• Connect to your instance using PUTTY over SSH
• Change the mode of your private key to avoid it being rejected

chmod 400 /path/to-your/.pem-file/        

• Enable port forwarding on your instance

ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 -i <path-to-your-PEM-file> ec2-user@<your-instance-public-IP-address>        

• Open tigerVNC on your local machine. for the VNC server, Enter, localhost:1

• You will be prompted for a password. Enter the password you created in step 3 (Installing tiger VNC)
• The first image above in this article appears.

Congratulations!. Now you're ready to interact with Linux GUI

References:

kimera joseph (Jan 26, 2022). blog, https://lnkd.in/gPnD8x2T