Amazon VPC CNI now supports higher bandwidth and network performance per pod

Starting today, you can attach multiple network interfaces to pods using the Amazon VPC Container Network Interface (CNI) Plugin. With this enhancement, you can now leverage the full bandwidth and network performance capabilities of underlying Amazon EC2 instances that support multiple network cards. This is especially useful for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and High Performance Computing (HPC) use cases.

By default, the Amazon VPC CNI plugin assigns one elastic network interface (ENI) to each pod. This interface handles all incoming and outgoing traffic for the pod. Customers who need to scale the network performance of their Kubernetes-based workloads can now configure multi-homed pods that interface with multiple network cards on the worker node. By maximizing network card capacity, application traffic will be distributed across multiple concurrent ENI connections, raising the bandwidth and packet rate performance in your workloads.

Starting with Amazon VPC CNI version 1.20.0, support for attaching multiple network interfaces to pods is available in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, visit the Amazon EKS documentation.