Create and attach an Elastic Fabric Adapter to an Amazon EC2 instance - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Create an EFAAttach an EFA to a stopped instanceAttach an EFA when launching an instanceAdd an EFA to a launch template

Create and attach an Elastic Fabric Adapter to an Amazon EC2 instance

You can create an EFA and attach it to an Amazon EC2 instance much like any other elastic network interface in Amazon EC2. However, unlike elastic network interfaces, EFAs can't be attached to or detached from an instance in a running state.

Considerations

  • You can change the security group that is associated with an EFA. To enable OS-bypass functionality, the EFA must be a member of a security group that allows all inbound and outbound traffic to and from the security group itself. For more information, see Step 1: Prepare an EFA-enabled security group.

    You change the security group that is associated with an EFA in the same way that you change the security group that is associated with an elastic network interface. For more information, see Modify network interface attributes.

  • You assign an Elastic IP (IPv4) and IPv6 address to an EFA (EFA with ENA) network interface in the same way that you assign an IP address to an elastic network interface. For more information, see Managing IP addresses.

    You can't assign an IP address to an EFA-only network interface.

Create an EFA

You can create an EFA in a subnet in a VPC. You can't move the EFA to another subnet after it's created, and you can only attach it to stopped instances in the same Availability Zone.

Console
To create an EFA (EFA with ENA or ENA-only) network interface

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Network Interfaces and then choose Create network interface.

  3. For Description, enter a descriptive name for the EFA.

  4. For Subnet, select the subnet in which to create the EFA.

  5. Interface type, choose one of the following options:

    • EFA with ENA — To create a network interface that supports both ENA and EFA devices.

    • EFA-only — To create a network interface with an EFA device only.

  6. (For EFA with ENA only) Configure the IP address and prefix assignment for the network interface. The type of IP addresses and prefixes you can assign depend on the selected subnet. For IPv4-only subnets, you can assign IPv4 IP addresses and prefixes only. For IPv6-only subnets, you can assign IPv6 IP addresses and prefixes only. For dual-stack subnets, you can assign both IPv4 and IPv6 IP addresses and prefixes.

    Note

    You can't assign IP addresses to an EFA-only network interface.

    1. For Private IPv4 address and/or IPv6 address, choose Auto-assign to have Amazon EC2 automatically assign an IP address from the selected subnet, or choose Custom to manually specify the IP address to assign.

    2. If you assign an IPv6 address, you can optionally enable Assign primary IPv6 IP. Doing this assigns a primary IPv6 global unicast address (GUA) to the network interface. Assigning a primary IPv6 address enables you to avoid disrupting traffic to instances or ENIs. For more information, see IPv6 addresses.

    3. For IPv4 prefix delegation and/or IPv6 prefix delegation, choose Auto-assign to have Amazon EC2 automatically assign a prefix from the subnet's CIDR block, or choose Custom to manually specify a prefix from the subnet's CIDR block. If you specify a prefix, AWS verifies that it is not already assigned to another resource. For more information, see Prefix delegation for Amazon EC2 network interfaces

    4. (Optional) Configure the Idle connection tracking timeout settings. For more information, see Idle connection tracking timeout

      • TCP established timeout — The timeout period, in seconds, for idle TCP connections in an established state. Min: 60 seconds. Max: 432000 seconds (5 days). Default: 432000 seconds. Recommended: Less than 432000 seconds.

      • UDP timeout — The timeout period, in seconds, for idle UDP flows that have seen traffic only in a single direction or a single request-response transaction. Min: 30 seconds. Max: 60 seconds. Default: 30 seconds.

      • UDP stream timeout — The timeout period, in seconds, for idle UDP flows classified as streams that have seen more than one request-response transaction. Min: 60 seconds. Max: 180 seconds (3 minutes). Default: 180 seconds.

  7. For Security groups, select one or more security groups.

  8. Choose Create network interface.

AWS CLI
To create an EFA

Use the create-network-interface command. For --interface-type, specify efa for an EFA network interface or efa-only for an EFA-only network interface.

aws ec2 create-network-interface \
    --subnet-id subnet-0abcdef1234567890 \
    --interface-type efa \
    --description "my efa"
PowerShell
To create an EFA

Use the New-EC2NetworkInterface cmdlet. For -InterfaceType, specify efa for an EFA network interface or efa-only for an EFA-only network interface

New-EC2NetworkInterface `
    -SubnetId subnet-0abcdef1234567890 `
    -InterfaceType efa `
    -Description "my efa"

Attach an EFA to a stopped instance

You can attach an EFA to any supported instance that is in the stopped state. You cannot attach an EFA to an instance that is in the running state. For more information about the supported instance types, see Supported instance types.

You attach an EFA to an instance in the same way that you attach a network interface to an instance. For more information, see Attach a network interface.

Attach an EFA when launching an instance

AWS CLI
To attach an existing EFA when launching an instance

Use the run-instances command with the --network-interfaces option. For the primary network interface, specify an EFA network interface and NetworkCardIndex=0, DeviceIndex=0. To attach multiple EFA network interfaces, see Maximize network bandwidth.

--network-interfaces "NetworkCardIndex=0, \
    DeviceIndex=0, \
    NetworkInterfaceId=eni-1234567890abcdef0, \
    Groups=sg-1234567890abcdef0, \
    SubnetId=subnet-0abcdef1234567890"
To attach a new EFA when launching an instance

Use the run-instances command with the --network-interfaces option. For the primary network interface, use NetworkCardIndex=0, DeviceIndex=0, and InterfaceType=efa. If you are attaching multiple EFA network interfaces, see Maximize network bandwidth.

--network-interfaces "NetworkCardIndex=0, \
    DeviceIndex=0, \
    InterfaceType=efa, \
    Groups=sg-1234567890abcdef0, \
    SubnetId=subnet-0abcdef1234567890"
PowerShell
To attach an existing EFA when launching an instance

Use the New-EC2Instance cmdlet with the -NetworkInterfaces parameter.

-NetworkInterface $networkInterface

Define the network interface as follows.

$networkInterface = New-Object Amazon.EC2.Model.InstanceNetworkInterfaceSpecification
$networkInterface.DeviceIndex = 0
$networkInterface.NetworkInterfaceId = "eni-1234567890abcdef0"
$networkInterface.Groups = @("sg-1234567890abcdef0")
$networkInterface.SubnetId = "subnet-0abcdef1234567890"
To attach a new EFA when launching an instance

Use the New-EC2Instance cmdlet with the -NetworkInterfaces parameter.

-NetworkInterface $networkInterface

Define the network interface as follows.

$networkInterface = New-Object Amazon.EC2.Model.InstanceNetworkInterfaceSpecification
$networkInterface.DeviceIndex = 0
$networkInterface.InterfaceType = "efa"
$networkInterface.Groups = @("sg-1234567890abcdef0")
$networkInterface.SubnetId = "subnet-0abcdef1234567890"

Add an EFA to a launch template

You can create a launch template that contains the configuration information needed to launch EFA-enabled instances. You can specify both EFA and EFA-only network interfaces in the launch template. To create an EFA-enabled launch template, create a new launch template and specify a supported instance type, your EFA-enabled AMI, and an EFA-enabled security group. For NetworkInterfaces, specify the EFA network interfaces to attach. For the primary network interface, use NetworkCardIndex=0, DeviceIndex=0, and InterfaceType=efa. If you are attaching multiple EFA network interfaces, see Maximize network bandwidth on Amazon EC2 instances with multiple network cards.

You can leverage launch templates to launch EFA-enabled instances with other AWS services, such as AWS Batch or AWS ParallelCluster.

For more information about creating launch templates, see Create an Amazon EC2 launch template.