Enable enhanced networking with ENA on your EC2 instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Prerequisites for enhanced networking with ENA

Enable enhanced networking with ENA on your EC2 instances

Amazon EC2 provides enhanced networking capabilities through the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA). To use enhanced networking, you must use an AMI that includes the required ENA driver or manually install it. Then you can enable ENA support on your instance.

To review release notes or install instructions for an ENA driver, see the tab that matches your instance operating system platform.

Linux

You can review the following documentation on GitHub:

Windows

You can review the following documentation from the Manage device drivers section of this guide:

For Nitro-based instances, enhanced networking capabilities vary by the Nitro version that the instance type implements.

To review network specifications for your instance, choose the instance family link for your instance type. If you're not sure which instance family applies, see Naming conventions in the Amazon EC2 Instance Types guide.

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Prerequisites for enhanced networking with ENA

To prepare for enhanced networking using the ENA, set up your instance as follows:

  • Launch a Nitro-based instance.

  • Ensure that the instance has internet connectivity.

  • If you have important data on the instance that you want to preserve, you should back that data up now by creating an AMI from your instance. Updating the ENA kernel driver and enabling the enaSupport attribute might render incompatible instances or operating systems unreachable. If you have a recent backup, your data will still be retained if this happens.

  • Linux instances – Launch the instance using a supported version of the Linux kernel and a supported distribution, so that ENA enhanced networking is enabled for your instance automatically. For more information, see ENA Linux Kernel Driver Release Notes.

  • Windows instances – If the instance is running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, ensure that is has the SHA-2 code signing support update.

  • Use AWS CloudShell from the AWS Management Console, or install and configure the AWS CLI or the AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell on any computer you choose, preferably your local desktop or laptop. For more information, see Access Amazon EC2 or the AWS CloudShell User Guide. Enhanced networking cannot be managed from the Amazon EC2 console.