SAA-C03 Practice Question 28: Global Accelerator UDP Failover
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 3 · question 8 of 10
A game studio runs multiplayer game servers on EC2 behind Network Load Balancers in us-east-1 and eu-west-1. Game traffic is UDP. The consoles' network firmware connects only to a fixed allow list of two IP addresses, which cannot be updated after release.
Players worldwide complain about lag and jitter over the public internet. If one Region fails, players must be moved to the other Region right away, without waiting for DNS caches to expire. Which solution meets these requirements?
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Answer:
AWS Global Accelerator gives you two static IPv4 addresses, anycast from the AWS edge network, and they stay assigned to the accelerator for as long as it exists. Those two addresses are the allow list the firmware needs, and they never change even as endpoints are added or moved. Listeners support TCP and UDP. Players enter the AWS global network at the nearest edge location, which cuts internet latency and jitter for gaming. Global Accelerator also reacts at once to endpoint health: if the primary Region's endpoint fails, it reroutes traffic to the next available Region. The IP addresses stay the same, so DNS is never involved in the failover.
Option A uses the wrong service. CloudFront is a content delivery network for web (HTTP and HTTPS) requests and doesn't carry raw UDP game traffic. Its origin failover also retries HTTP requests, not long-lived game sessions.
Option B depends on DNS. Clients and resolvers cache answers, and some ignore short TTLs, so failover isn't immediate. Latency records also return the NLBs' own changing addresses, which the firmware's fixed allow list can't follow.
Option D gives fixed IP addresses but no acceleration, since traffic still crosses the public internet the whole way. It also relies on retry logic in the console, and the firmware can't be updated to add it.
References: What is AWS Global Accelerator?; Understanding AWS Global Accelerator use cases; AWS Global Accelerator FAQs