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Amazon EKS Adds EFA and Placement Groups Support

infraawsengineeraws-ec2aws-eks
feature

Amazon EKS now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and EC2 Placement Groups for node pools configured with EKS Auto Mode and Karpenter. This enhancement allows for optimized performance and availability of distributed workloads, such as training and inference, by providing finer control over network interface configuration and instance placement. These features are now available in all AWS Regions where EKS is offered.

  • →EKS Auto Mode and Karpenter support EFA configuration
  • →EKS Auto Mode and Karpenter support EC2 Placement Groups
  • →EFA benefits for IP utilization and bandwidth
  • →Placement group benefits for instance distribution
  • →Availability and documentation
Features (2) ›
  • EKS Auto Mode and Karpenter support EFA configuration

    Amazon EKS now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) configuration for node pools managed by EKS Auto Mode and Karpenter. This allows users to control EFA network interface settings, enabling EFA-only or standard ENI configurations on EFA-capable instances.

  • EKS Auto Mode and Karpenter support EC2 Placement Groups

    Amazon EKS now supports EC2 Placement Groups for node pools managed by EKS Auto Mode and Karpenter. Users can configure instances to use cluster, spread, or partition strategies for physical distribution across AWS infrastructure, enhancing performance, availability, and fault isolation.

Notes (3) ›
  • EFA benefits for IP utilization and bandwidth

    EFA-only interfaces do not consume IP addresses, providing finer control over VPC IP utilization and achieving full interconnect bandwidth. This is beneficial for optimizing network-intensive workloads.

  • Placement group benefits for instance distribution

    Placement groups allow control over how EC2 instances are physically distributed, enabling optimizations for throughput in distributed training jobs or minimizing blast radius for critical production services.

  • Availability and documentation

    These new capabilities are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon EKS is available. Users can refer to the EKS Auto Mode User Guide and Karpenter documentation for more details.

Read the original announcement →

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/07/amazon-eks-efa-placement-groups/

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