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Global Accelerator: Unexpected Outgoing Australia Traffic (NA-AU-OUT-Bytes-Internet)

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We have a global accelerator in front of our ALB. Almost 90% of the traffic has been switched from NA-EU (origin North America destiny Europe) to NA-AU (origin North America destiny Australia). We have checked the origin IPs from our ALB logs and we mostly see Europe IPs.

As far as I understand if somebody is coming from the edge location AU it means that it may be in either Australia or New Zealand. Here https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/features/ it says:

Australia and New Zealand Edge Locations: Auckland, New Zealand; Melbourne, Australia; Perth, Australia; Sydney, Australia

This is a chart from the billing dashboard filtered by "Global Accelerator" service. These are the GBs transferred from NA to both EU (Red) and AU (Blue). Our operations are not designed to expect such a change. ALB logs show pure IPs from Europe.

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We have used https://www.maxmind.com IPs data base to find where our customer are coming from. I can't explain this traffic to AU. Any ideas?

Topics
Networking & Content Delivery
Tags
Application Load BalancerAWS Global Accelerator
Language
English

asked a year ago200 views

1 Answer
0

What you're experiencing with AWS Global Accelerator is likely related to how traffic is routed through AWS's global network infrastructure and how this routing is reflected in your billing.

AWS Global Accelerator uses anycast static IP addresses that route client traffic to the nearest AWS edge location. From there, traffic is routed over the private AWS network to endpoints in a specific Region based on routing rules configured in Global Accelerator. This approach reduces latency by minimizing traffic on the public internet.

The billing metrics you're seeing (NA-AU-OUT-Bytes-Internet) represent data transfer from North America to Australia. However, this doesn't necessarily mean your end users are physically located in Australia. CloudWatch metrics for Global Accelerator use dimensions like "SourceRegion" and "DestinationEdge" to categorize traffic:

  • SourceRegion refers to the geographic area of AWS Regions where your application endpoints are running
  • DestinationEdge refers to the geographic area of AWS edge locations serving your client traffic

The discrepancy between your billing showing Australia traffic and your ALB logs showing European IPs could be due to several factors:

  1. Global Accelerator might be routing traffic through Australian edge locations based on network conditions, even if the original requests are from Europe
  2. There could be routing optimizations happening within AWS's private network that are sending traffic through Australia before reaching your endpoints
  3. The traffic might be following a path that involves edge locations in Australia due to current network conditions or routing decisions

To troubleshoot this issue, you could:

  1. Monitor CloudWatch metrics for your Global Accelerator to see traffic patterns by source and destination
  2. Check if there have been any recent changes to your Global Accelerator configuration
  3. Contact AWS Support for more detailed analysis of your specific traffic patterns, as they can provide insights into why traffic is being routed through Australian edge locations

This unexpected routing pattern doesn't necessarily indicate a problem with your setup, but rather reflects how Global Accelerator dynamically optimizes traffic routing across AWS's global network.
Sources
Global Accelerator request routing - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
Using Amazon CloudWatch with AWS Global Accelerator - AWS Global Accelerator

answered a year ago

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