ENA Express for Amazon EC2 instances now supports traffic between Availability Zones

Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) Express now supports traffic between Amazon EC2 instances in different Availability Zones within a Region, delivering up to 25 Gbps single-flow bandwidth. ENA Express is a networking feature that uses the AWS Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol to improve network performance. SRD is a reliable network protocol that delivers performance improvements through advanced congestion control and multi-pathing. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) io2 Block Express and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for high performance computing and machine learning workloads also leverage SRD.

Workloads such as distributed storage, databases, and file systems require deployments spanning multiple Availability Zones for resilience, yet single flows between zones support up to 5 Gbps with ENA. ENA Express delivers up to 25 Gbps single-flow bandwidth for traffic between Availability Zones. To achieve this, ENA Express detects compatibility between your EC2 instances and establishes an SRD connection when both communicating instances have ENA Express enabled. Once established, SRD uses multi-pathing to route your traffic across the network and avoids head-of-line blocking as it does not need packets to arrive in order. Using these capabilities, ENA Express delivers the performance benefits transparently to your application with TCP and UDP protocols.

ENA Express for connections between Availability Zones within a Region is available for all supported instance types and sizes in Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Malaysia, Melbourne, Mumbai, New Zealand, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Thailand, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Canada West (Calgary), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Spain, Stockholm, Zurich), Israel (Tel Aviv), Mexico (Central), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. ENA Express comes at no additional cost. For a list of supported instances and configuration guidance, please review the latest EC2 documentation.