AWS ENI, EN & EFA

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam, to view the whole series click here.

Elastic Network Interface (ENI) Summary

• Essentially a virtual network card that can be attached to instances within your VPC.
• Used to enable network connectivity for your instances.
• Can use multiple network interfaces to create a management network.
• Used for low budget and highly available solutions.

Enhanced Networking (EN) Summary

• Uses single root I/O virtualisation to provide high performance networking.
• Provides higher bandwidth and packets per second
• No additional charges for EN, but your EC2 instances needs to support it
• You would use EN instead of ENI when you have more network throughput.
• Used when you need a reliably high throughput and speeds between 10–100Gbps.

Depending on instance type EN can enable:

1. Elastic Network Adapter(ENA) → Supports network speeds of up to 100Gbps
2. Intel 82599 Virtual Function (VF) → Supports network speeds up to 10Gbps, used for older instances.

Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) Summary

• Network device you attach to EC2 instances to accelerate High Performance Computing (HPC) & ML applications.
• Can use OS Bypass to by pass operating system and communicate directly with EFA device which enhances inter-instance communications
• Can scale to thousands of CPUs or GPUs