AWS Direct Connect now supports VIF Rate Limiters to help prevent network congestion

AWS Direct Connect now supports Virtual Interface (VIF) Rate Limiters on dedicated connections, which help you prevent network congestion caused by unexpected traffic spikes on a VIF which can potentially consume all available bandwidth, impacting workloads on other VIFs on the same connection.

With VIF Rate Limiters, you can set a maximum bandwidth allocation for up to 10 VIFs on a dedicated connection, choosing from a wide range available capacity increments from 50 Mbps to 1.6 Tbps when using a link aggregation group. Rate limiting applies to traffic both ingressing and egressing the AWS network. If traffic on a rate-limited VIF exceeds the configured capacity, excess packets are dropped, preventing that VIF from consuming bandwidth needed by other VIFs on the same connection. A new traffic utilization metric presented as percentage of the VIF’s configured capacity and dropped packet counts are published to Amazon CloudWatch, where you can configure alarms based on your thresholds. The new metrics make it easy to understand how your VIFs are using their bandwidth allocation and adjust accordingly.

VIF Rate Limiters are available in all AWS Regions in the commercial and China partitions where AWS Direct Connect dedicated connections are supported. You can configure Rate Limiters through the AWS Direct Connect console, API, or SDK.

To learn more, see VIF Rate Limiters in the AWS Direct Connect User Guide.