GlobalAccelerator / S3 / CloudFront question erratum

[gch99]

Q: A company hosts a web application service in the AWS eu-west-1 region. The application serves high-resolution weather maps to users. The maps are updated frequently which are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket along with the static web contents. The web application is behind an Amazon CloudFront distribution. The company has expanded and now provides the same service to North American users. The new users report that their viewing experience with the weather maps is inconsistent and slow at times.

Which of the following steps can be implemented to provide consistent performance to the users? (Select TWO.)

A (<i style=””>indicated as correct): Create a new AWS Global Accelerator endpoint for the us-east-1 bucket and add it as an origin for the CloudFront distribution. Use Lamda@Edge to modify North American requests to use this new origin.

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This is not correct because you cannot create a Global Accelerator endpoint for an S3 bucket. Moreover, the CloudFront distribution already routes traffic from the edge POP over the AWS global network, so Global Accelerator wouldn’t further increase network performance.

“Endpoints in Global Accelerator can be Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, Amazon EC2 instances, or Elastic IP addresses.”

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/about-endpoints-adding-endpoints.html

“AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon CloudFront are separate services that use the AWS global network and its edge locations around the world. CloudFront improves performance for both cacheable content (such as images and videos) and dynamic content (such as API acceleration and dynamic site delivery). Global Accelerator improves performance for a wide range of applications over TCP or UDP by proxying packets at the edge to applications running in one or more AWS Regions.”

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/faqs/

[Kenneth-Samonte-Tutorials-Dojo]

Hi gch99,

Thanks for the feedback.

The Global Accelerator endpoint is not for the S3 bucket. As stated on the question, “A company hosts a web application service in the AWS eu-west-1 region.” so it could be a Load balancer or EC2 instances, as the origin on Cloudfront.

There is another origin on the “us-east-1” region, that’s why the CloudFront distribution is needed to run a Lambda@Edge to identify if the users is from North America and direct that request to the correct global accelerator endpoint.

Hope this helps.

Let us know if you need further assistance. The Tutorials Dojo team is dedicated to helping you pass your AWS exam!

Regards,

Kenneth Samonte @ Tutorials Dojo

[seth_e]

I agree with @gch99 that putting CloudFront in front of Global Accelerator seems odd. Can you point to any AWS reference where this is done?

[seth_e]

Also your answer say exactly the following:

> Create a new AWS Global Accelerator endpoint for the us-east-1 bucket

You should change it to say for the “web application” is that is what you mean

[gch99]

@Kenneth-Samonte-Tutorials-Dojo – thank you!

Excerpt from the “correct” answer:

“Create a new AWS Global Accelerator endpoint for the us-east-1 bucket”

Excerpt from your response:

“The Global Accelerator endpoint is not for the S3 bucket.”

This is a direct contradiction. If the GA endpoint is not (& cannot be) for the S3 bucket, then the correct answer should not be: “Create a new Global Accelerator endpoint for the us-east-1 bucket”, which is unambiguously impossible and erroneous. (If it were more ambiguous then maybe that would be fair game, but it’s not.) As @seth_e points out, at the very least this answer choice needs to be rewritten.
Thanks!

[Kenneth-Samonte-Tutorials-Dojo]

Hello,

Thanks for the feedback on this question.

I have reviewed the scenario and I have made revisions to the explanation to reflect proper AWS documentation.

The goal of this question scenario is to use AWS Global Accelerator and I think that it is still the suitable choice for this scenario.

S3 acceleration can help speed up the process of transfers to and from Amazon S3. However, it would incur additional costs in terms of data transfers.

Hope this helps.

Let us know if you need further assistance. The Tutorials Dojo team is dedicated to helping you pass your AWS exam!

Regards,

Kenneth Samonte @ Tutorials Dojo

[seth_e]

Thank you… please note that you cannot use AGA as an origin for CloudFront https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/latest/APIReference/API_Origin.html

[Lorenzo]

there’s a lot of problem with the answer and the solutions suggested here, the question states that the app is in a single region: “a company hosts a web application service in the AWS eu-west-1 region.” so yeah if the solution you suggest is to connect the global accelerator to the app stack instead of the bucket doesn’t solve anything, because we’re at most replicating the file, and nowehere else is stated, suggested or implied that there’s a multi region stack.