The Floodgates Are Open – Increased Network Bandwidth for EC2 Instances

I hope that you have configured your AMIs and your current-generation EC2 instances to use the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) that I told you about back in mid-2016. The ENA gives you high throughput and low latency, while minimizing the load on the host processor. It is designed to work well in the presence of multiple vCPUs, with intelligent packet routing backed up by multiple transmit and receive queues.

Today we are opening up the floodgates and giving you access to more bandwidth in all AWS Regions. Here are the specifics (in each case, the actual bandwidth is dependent on the instance type and size):

EC2 to S3 – Traffic to and from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) can now take advantage of up to 25 Gbps of bandwidth. Previously, traffic of this type had access to 5 Gbps of bandwidth. This will be of benefit to applications that access large amounts of data in S3 or that make use of S3 for backup and restore.

EC2 to EC2 – Traffic to and from EC2 instances in the same or different Availability Zones within a region can now take advantage of up to 5 Gbps of bandwidth for single-flow traffic, or 25 Gbps of bandwidth for multi-flow traffic (a flow represents a single, point-to-point network connection) by using private IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, as described here.

EC2 to EC2 (Cluster Placement Group) – Traffic to and from EC2 instances within a cluster placement group can continue to take advantage of up to 10 Gbps of lower-latency bandwidth for single-flow traffic, or 25 Gbps of lower-latency bandwidth for multi-flow traffic.

To take advantage of this additional bandwidth, make sure that you are using the latest, ENA-enabled AMIs on current-generation EC2 instances. ENA-enabled AMIs are available for Amazon Linux, Ubuntu 14.04 & 16.04, RHEL 7.4, SLES 12, and Windows Server (2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, and 2016). The FreeBSD AMI in AWS Marketplace is also ENA-enabled, as is VMware Cloud on AWS.

— Jeff;