Edge Security Accelerator (ESA) reduces global network latency through smart routing and ensures business continuity and high availability under high concurrency with traffic control and load balancing.
Reduce network latency
Smart Routing detects real-time network conditions across Alibaba Cloud global edge points of presence (POPs), selects the optimal route for data transmission, and combines high-performance protocol stack with other technologies to significantly reduce latency and request failure rates. This effectively improves user experience and ensures your business continuity.
Scenarios
Smart routing is especially beneficial for services with broad geographic coverage, providing better access experience for users in distant locations.
For cross-region enterprises, smart routing can significantly enhance capabilities in the following aspects:
-
Network performance: Reduces latency and packet loss, improving data transmission efficiency.
-
Availability: Ensures continuous stable operation of critical business applications.
Improve availability
By traffic control
Traffic control is essential for ensuring high availability of origin servers. It effectively mitigates the impact of burst traffic and prevents server overload. ESA provides the waiting room feature for this purpose.
How it works
When traffic spikes, the waiting room intelligently distributes requests, limits simultaneous users, and manages waiting users to keep the server stable:
-
During traffic peaks, the waiting room data analytics module monitors key metrics, such as peak traffic and user waiting times, in real time. This information helps identify pressure points and optimize the waiting room settings.
-
The waiting room scheduled event feature lets you adjust queuing rules and active user limits, expanding service capabilities based on actual business needs.
-
You can also create waiting room bypass rules to exempt specific requests, such as critical traffic or high-priority users, so they reach the server directly during peak periods without affecting core business functions.
Scenarios
During e-commerce promotions, online events, or sudden traffic surges, ESA manages burst traffic through traffic distribution, data analytics, dynamic adjustments, and priority control to keep critical operations running smoothly.
By dynamic traffic allocation
Load balancing distributes incoming network or application traffic across multiple origin pools or servers, improving system performance, reliability, and user experience, ensuring high availability.
How it works
Load balancing monitors server status and load in real time and selects the optimal server for each request based on load balancing policies, such as primary/secondary, weighted round-robin, or area-based scheduling. This prevents traffic from concentrating on a single server, reducing the risk of service interruption or performance degradation due to overload.
Key benefits of load balancing:
-
Improved availability and stability: Reduces single points of failure and protects against overload.
-
Enhanced performance: Optimizes resource allocation, improving server response times and processing capacity.
-
Optimized resource utilization: Ensures efficient use of server resources, minimizing waste.
-
Better user experience: Reduces latency and enhances response speed for users.
Load balancing also supports health checks that monitor servers in real time and automatically isolate faulty or underperforming servers, redirecting traffic to healthy servers. With Custom rule configuration, you can match traffic by criteria such as client source IP or HTTP request headers and apply tailored load balancing settings to further improve reliability and fault tolerance.
Scenarios
Load balancers are commonly used in high-concurrency, large-scale scenarios, including web services, cloud platforms, microservices architectures, and content delivery networks.
For organizations of all sizes, load balancing is essential for building an efficient, reliable, and scalable network architecture.