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EFS (Elastic File System)

  • Managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on 100s of EC2
  • EFS works with Linux EC2 instances in multi-AZ
  • Highly available, scalable, expensive (3x gp2), pay per use, no capacity planning
  • Use cases: content management, web serving, data sharing, Wordpress
  • Uses NFSv4.1 protocol
  • Uses security group to control access to EFS
  • Compatible with Linux based AMI (not Windows)
  • Encryption at rest using KMS
  • POSIX file system (~Linux) that has a standard file API
  • File system scales automatically, pay-per-use, no capacity planning! EFS

EFS Performance classes​

EFS Scale​

  • 1000s of concurrent NFS clients, 10 GB+ /s throughput
  • Grow to Petabyte-scale network file system, automatically

Performance Mode (set at EFS creation time)​

  • General Purpose (default) – latency-sensitive use cases (web server, CMS, etc…)
  • Max I/O – higher latency, throughput, highly parallel (big data, media processing)

Throughput Mode​

  • Bursting – 1 TB = 50MiB/s + burst of up to 100MiB/s
  • Provisioned – set your throughput regardless of storage size, ex: 1 GiB/s for 1 TB storage
  • Elastic – automatically scales throughput up or down based on your workloads
  • Up to 3GiB/s for reads and 1GiB/s for writes
  • Used for unpredictable workloads

EFS Storage classes​

Storage Tiers (lifecycle management feature – move file after N days)​

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  • Standard: for frequently accessed files
  • Infrequent access (EFS-IA): cost to retrieve files, lower price to store.
  • Archive: rarely accessed data (few times each year), 50% cheaper
  • Implement lifecycle policies to move files between storage tiers

Availability and durability​

  • Standard: Multi-AZ, great for prod
  • One Zone: One AZ, great for dev, backup enabled by

EFS-IA(Infrequent access)​

  • Storage class that is cost-optimized for files not accessed every day
  • Up to 92% lower cost compared to EFS Standard
  • EFS will automatically move your files to EFS-IA based on the last time they were accessed
  • Enable EFS-IA with a Lifecycle Policy
  • Example: move files that are not accessed for 60 days to EFS-IA
  • Transparent to the applications accessing EFS EFS-IA

EFS vs EBS​

EFS vs EBS

Last updated on by kirbeee