AWS Direct Connect now Supports Jumbo Frames for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Traffic

Posted on: Oct 11, 2018

Customers can now use Jumbo Frames for traffic between their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and on-premises networks over AWS Direct Connect.

The maximum transmission unit (MTU) of a network connection is the size, in bytes, of the largest permissible packet that can be passed over the connection. The larger the MTU of a connection, the more data can be passed in a single packet. Until now, traffic over AWS Direct Connect was limited to 1,500 MTU.

With this release, customers can use Jumbo Frames for their AWS Direct Connect traffic. Jumbo Frames allow more than 1,500 bytes (up to 9,001 bytes) of data by increasing the payload size per packet, and thus lowering the packet overhead. As a result, you need fewer packets to send the same amount of data, which improves the end-to-end network performance. In addition, this release enables new use cases, such as supporting network overlay protocols, for on-premises connectivity over AWS Direct Connect.

Support for Jumbo Frames over AWS Direct Connect is available in all AWS Regions. For more information see the AWS Direct Connect documentation.