The author likes AWS Global Accelerator. The author likes GA mainly because it uses BGP anycast, which means that the packets drop into AWS' network at the closest AWS point-of-presence, instead of traversing the internet. The author's experience is that this feature of GA, when combined with always-on VMs that do not need to cold start, provides him low latency for a particular service he is running.

The author also mentions Cloudflare and Google App Engine, but rejects these because on those services he chose to use the lambda-like compute functionality and wasn't prepared for the cold starts. He doesn't appear to have tried using Lambda on AWS, or dedicated VMs with Google. Thus it is a slightly apples-to-oranges comparison.

I guess the blog is using referrer stripping as an example to demo/play with AWS global accelerator.

If it was me, I would set referrer-policy: origin (or no-referrer) header[1] and avoid all the overhead. Supported on all current browsers[2], and no additional costs or code to worry about.

Also, does it seem a bit insecure to anyone else to outsource referrer stripping services if your goal is to secure the content of the referrer from third parties? How well do you trust the middlemen in this case?

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...

2. https://caniuse.com/referrer-policy

Looks to be a service to remove the HTTP referer header when linking to other sites.

Say your on example.com and click a a link to foo.com the browser will send the http header `Referer: example.com` in the HTTP get to foo.com, this means foo.com can then track how you came to their site.