Fine grain traffic shaping offload for a network interface card

A network interface card with traffic shaping capabilities and methods of network traffic shaping with a network interface card are provided. The network interface card and method can shape traffic originating from one or more applications executing on a host network device. The applications can execute in a virtual machine or containerized computing environment. The network interface card and method can perform or include several traffic shaping mechanisms including, for example and without limitation, a delayed completion mechanism, a time-indexed data structure, a packet builder, and a memory manager.