You run servers for a real-time multiplayer game that uses UDP on Network Load Balancers in multiple Regions. You want to reduce latency for players worldwide and switch to another Region quickly during a Regional failure. In addition, the destination IP addresses embedded in the client cannot be changed. Which service is the most appropriate?

Explanation

AWS Global Accelerator provides two fixed anycast IP addresses and forwards traffic from the nearest edge location over the AWS global network to the optimal endpoint. It supports both TCP and UDP, and switchover on health check failure is fast because it does not depend on DNS TTLs.

Per-choice explanations

Practical Use

AWS Global Accelerator issues two anycast static IP addresses per accelerator, receives traffic destined for those addresses at the nearest AWS edge location, and carries it to Regional endpoints over the AWS global network (backbone). Endpoints can be Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, EC2 instances, or Elastic IPs, and you can control distribution with per-Region traffic dials and per-endpoint weights. Compared with paths over the internet, packet loss and jitter are reduced, and it supports both TCP and UDP. The first branch point is how it differs from CloudFront. CloudFront targets HTTP / HTTPS and caches content at the edge, making it strong for static content and video delivery. Global Accelerator has no cache and optimizes packet forwarding regardless of protocol, so it suits non-HTTP, low-latency workloads such as gaming, VoIP, IoT, and financial trading. The difference from Route 53 latency-based routing lies in switchover speed. Route 53 changes the destination in the DNS response, so old destinations continue to be used until client and resolver caches expire. Global Accelerator switches the internal forwarding target while the destination IP seen by the client stays the same, so switchover is unaffected by DNS caching. In addition, static IPs fit requirements to register addresses in firewall allow lists or to embed IPs in clients. On SAA-C03, keywords such as "UDP," "non-HTTP protocol," "static IPs required," "fast failover that does not depend on DNS," and "reduce global latency" point to Global Accelerator. Distractors include CloudFront (HTTP only, caching purpose), Route 53 latency-based routing (DNS-dependent, slow switchover), and ALBs spanning Regions (with an IP address type target group and inter-Region VPC peering you can register instances in another Region, while instance ID type targets are limited to the load balancer's own VPC; either way an ALB is a layer 7 load balancer for HTTP / HTTPS, does not support UDP, and provides no static IPs, so it cannot meet the requirements here). Whether the question is about CloudFront or Global Accelerator can be told from the protocol involved and whether caching is needed.