Introducing Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), the next generation network interface for EC2 instances
Amazon EC2 has announced Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), the next generation network interface and accompanying drivers that provide Enhanced Networking on EC2 instances.
ENA is a custom network interface optimized to deliver high throughput and packet per second (PPS) performance, and consistently low latencies on EC2 instances. Using ENA, customers can utilize up to 20 Gbps of network bandwidth on certain EC2 instance types. ENA-based Enhanced Networking is currently supported on X1 instances, and will be available on other new EC2 instance types in the future.
Open Source licensed ENA drivers are currently available for Linux and Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (Intel® DPDK), and we will soon be releasing an ENA driver for Microsoft Windows® operating systems. The latest Amazon Linux AMI includes the ENA Linux driver support by default. ENA Linux driver source code is also available on github.com for developers to integrate in their AMIs. There is no additional fee to use ENA. For more information, read the Enhanced Networking documentation.