Typically with public cloud vendors you get SR-IOV networking above a certain VM size, but you may have to jump through hoops to enable it.

I'm not sure about AWS, but in Azure it is called "Accelerated Networking" and it is available in most recent VM sizes that have 4 CPUs or more.

It enables direct hardware connectivity and all offload options. In my testing it reduces latency dramatically, with typical applications seeing a 5x faster small transactions. Similarly, you can get "wire speed" for single TCP streams without any special coding.

AWS uses an in house tcp-like protocol optimized for distributed computing. Said protocol is implemented on a hardware nic. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=916...