ENA Express for AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

AWS announces ENA Express, a purpose-built network interface powered by the SRD (scalable reliable datagram) protocol, for EC2 instances in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. ENA Express is an ENA feature that uses the SRD protocol to improve network performance in two key ways: higher single flow bandwidth and lower tail latency for network traffic between EC2 instances.

Workloads such as databases, file systems, and distributed storage systems need larger single flows and are sensitive to variance in tail latency. Before today, customers could use multipath TCP to increase bandwidth, but this adds complexity and at times, it maybe incompatible with the application layer. TCP is also not equipped to handle congestion when your server is overloaded with requests. SRD is a proprietary protocol that delivers these improvements through congestion control, multi-pathing, and packet reordering directly from the Nitro card. Enabling ENA Express is a simple configuration that makes enabling SRD as easy as a single command or console toggle for your EC2 instances.

Using the SRD protocol, ENA Express increases the maximum single flow bandwidth and improves tail latencies for high throughput workloads. ENA Express works transparently to your applications with the TCP and UDP protocols. When configured, ENA Express works between any two supported instances in an Availability Zone.

ENA Express is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and comes at no additional cost. To learn more and get started, please review the latest EC2 Documentation.