Leveraging AWS Global Accelerator to Obtain Static IP Addresses: A Solution for Unstable Networks in Myanmar

Introduction

In Myanmar, unstable or restricted access to the internet has become a major issue for businesses and individuals. Some business companies encountered customers who couldn’t access their applications or portals that were hosted on AWS. So, they need static IPs to get whitelisted over Telecom. AWS Global Accelerator offers a unique solution by providing static IP addresses that ensure reliable and high-performance connectivity. In this post, we’ll explore how AWS Global Accelerator works, why static IPs are important in these circumstances, and how to implement this service in your AWS infrastructure.

What is AWS Global Accelerator?

AWS Global Accelerator is a networking service that improves the availability and performance of your applications by routing traffic through the AWS global network. It provides two static IP addresses, which are anycast from AWS edge locations worldwide.

If you would like to know more details, you can explore here.

Key Benefits:

• Static IP Addresses: Remain consistent even if the underlying resources or regions change.

• Global Reach: Improves latency by leveraging the AWS global network, ensuring a more stable connection.

• Automatic Failover: Traffic is routed to healthy endpoints in the event of an issue, ensuring high availability.

• Easily manage endpoints: AWS Global Accelerator’s static IP addresses make it easy to move endpoints between availability zones or AWS regions without needing to update your DNS configuration or change client-facing applications.

Why Static IPs Matter for Myanmar

Given the current situation in Myanmar, internet restrictions and network disruptions can lead to challenges when accessing online services. Static IPs from AWS Global Accelerator offer:

• Reliability: A stable IP address that won’t change, ensuring continuous access to services.

• Unblockable Routes: Dynamic IP changes may trigger blocks; static IPs offer a consistent point of contact.

• Reduced Latency: Traffic routed through AWS’s edge locations may provide faster and more reliable access, even from Myanmar.

Implementing AWS Global Accelerator for Static IPs

Today I will try with AWS ECS, ALB and Global Accelerator for my demo. Bear with me.

Prerequisites:

• AWS ECS cluster

• Container knowledge

• One main thing (AWS account) just kidding. Let start.

1. I will deploy my hello-world nodejs application on AWS ECS cluster. So, we should have one ECS cluster. I’ve created for this. After that, I will create one task definition for my application.

I will use my ECR repository to deploy nodejs hello-world application. I already pushed the Docker image to my ECR repository. If you would like to know about ECR, you can read here.

Note: Here if we don’t use port mapping, we can’t use application-loadbalancer for that ECS task(this look like k8s service). You can use different port depends on your application.

2. Then I will use this task definition to create ECS service. I will use fargate type for my service.

For networking, I will use my dev-test vpc, and I want to use this service from public, so I used public subnets.

For loadbalancing, I will use application loadbalancer. Here, I think you already familiar with this “node-js 3000:3000”. This looks like when we run our application in Docker to expose host port.

After clicking "Create," AWS will run our ECS service with CloudFormation. If you want to check in CloudFormation, you can click “View in CloudFormation. You will see creation events.

3. After ECS service is successfully activated, please try to test the created ALB endpoint in the browser.

4. Now, we will go to our main purpose to get static IPs for our application. We can easily integrate with ALB and Global Accelerator. Go to ALB tab and find our node-js alb. And then go to the integration tab. Now we see AWS Global Accelerator. Click “Create Accelerator.”

AWS will automatically integrate with GA and ALB.

Let check in GA. It’s now in progress.

After provision status was deployed, try to call the AWS-provided IPs.

We’ve now successfully integrated with AWS ECS, ALB and GA. Sorry for my hello-world application 🙁. I’m not good at programming 😩.

If you want to explore about Global Accelerator, you can explore here.

Here is one tip and trick. Don’t forget to delete the created resources if you just want to test with me 🙃.

Conclusion

By utilizing AWS Global Accelerator, businesses and individuals in Myanmar can mitigate the impact of internet restrictions and disruptions. The static IP feature ensures a stable, unblockable, and reliable connection to critical online services, making it a valuable tool in the current environment.