Elastic File System (EFS)

Overview

• Amazon EFS provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources.

• It is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files.

• The service manages all the file storage infrastructure for you, meaning that you can avoid the complexity of deploying, patching, and maintaining complex file system configurations.

• Amazon EFS supports the Network File System version 4 (NFSv4.1 and NFSv4.0) protocol.

  • EFS only supports Linux instances.

• Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system at the same time, providing a common data source for workloads.

Storage Classes

• Amazon EFS offers two storage classes, Standard and Infrequent Access.

  • The Standard storage class is used to store frequently accessed files.

  • The Infrequent Access (IA) storage class is a lower-cost storage class that's designed for storing long-lived, infrequently accessed files cost-effectively.

• Amazon EFS file systems store data and metadata across multiple Availability Zones in an AWS Region.

Lifecycle management

• Lifecycle management automatically manages cost-effective file storage for your file systems.

• When enabled, lifecycle management migrates files that have not been accessed for a set period of time to the Infrequent Access (IA) storage class.

  • You define that period of time by using a lifecycle policy.

• After lifecycle management moves a file into the IA storage class, the file remains there indefinitely.

• Lifecycle management applies to all files in the file system.

Performance Modes

• General Purpose Performance Mode:

  • Recommended for the majority of your Amazon EFS file systems.

  • General Purpose is ideal for latency-sensitive use cases, like web serving environments, content management systems, home directories, and general file serving.

  • EFS selects the General Purpose mode for you by default.

• Max I/O Performance Mode:

  • File systems in the Max I/O mode can scale to higher levels of aggregate throughput and operations per second.

  • This scaling is done with a trade-off of slightly higher latencies for file metadata operations.

  • Highly parallelized applications and workloads, such as big data analysis, media processing, and genomics analysis, can benefit from this mode.