A SaaS provider exposes APIs through an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in us-east-1 that forwards requests to an Amazon EKS cluster. The APIs use several non-standard REST methods (LINK, UNLINK, LOCK, UNLOCK). Users outside the United States experience long and inconsistent response times. The solutions architect must improve global performance while minimizing operational overhead. Which solution accomplishes this?

AWS Global Accelerator is the most effective solution for improving global performance with minimal operational overhead. It uses the AWS global network to route user traffic to the nearest healthy endpoint, reducing latency and improving consistency for users outside the United States. Configuring the existing ALB as the accelerator endpoint leverages the current infrastructure without requiring significant changes. Adding a CloudFront distribution is not ideal because CloudFront primarily caches GET requests. The APIs use non-standard REST methods (LINK, UNLINK, LOCK, UNLOCK), which are unlikely to be cached effectively, thus limiting performance improvement for these operations. Adding an API Gateway edge-optimized endpoint would introduce additional operational overhead and cost, as it's a separate service that would need to be managed and configured to proxy to the ALB. While it offers edge optimization, Global Accelerator provides a more direct and transparent way to leverage the AWS global network for existing ALB-based services. Deploying APIs to additional regions with latency-based routing would significantly increase operational overhead due to managing multiple EKS clusters, ALBs, and data synchronization across regions. This is a more complex solution than simply optimizing routing to the existing infrastructure.