Announcing Kubernetes Dynamic Resource Allocation for Elastic Fabric Adapter

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) for Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), simplifying high-performance inter-node communication and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads. The EFA DRA driver, built on the upstream DRANET project, brings EFA interface sharing and topology-aware allocation for workloads running on Kubernetes.

With the EFA DRA driver, you can allocate EFA interfaces and accelerator devices that share the same PCIe root or device group, ensuring inter-node traffic flows through the closest network interface to each NVIDIA GPU, AWS Trainium, or AWS Inferentia device on the node. The EFA DRA driver also supports EFA interface sharing across workloads on the same node to maximize EFA interface utilization.

The EFA DRA driver is recommended for new deployments on Amazon EKS clusters running Kubernetes version 1.34 or later with EKS managed node groups or self-managed nodes. The EFA DRA driver is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon EKS is available. The EFA device plugin remains supported and is recommended for use with Karpenter and Amazon EKS Auto Mode.

To learn more, see Manage EFA devices on Amazon EKS in the Amazon EKS User Guide.