Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
Amazon EFS is a fully managed, scalable file storage service using the Linux Network File System (NFS) protocol that automatically scales to petabytes without disrupting applications.
Core Benefits​
Multi-AZ Redundancy: Data is stored across multiple Availability Zones for high durability and availability, ensuring protection against AZ-level failures.
Shared Access: Multiple EC2 instances can access the same file system simultaneously, enabling shared workloads and collaborative applications.
Elastic Storage: Automatically scales storage capacity up or down as files are added or removed, with no minimum fees or setup costs required.
EFS Storage Classes​
Standard Storage Classes: EFS Standard and EFS Standard-Infrequent Access (Standard-IA) offer Multi-AZ resilience with highest durability and availability levels, suitable for frequently accessed data.
One Zone Storage Classes: EFS One Zone and EFS One Zone-IA provide cost savings by storing data in a single Availability Zone, reducing costs compared to Standard classes.
Archive Storage Class: EFS Archive is cost-optimized for data accessed only a few times per year, offering up to 50% lower storage costs compared to EFS Infrequent Access for cold data.
Data Lifecycle Management​
EFS automatically optimizes storage costs through lifecycle policies that move data between storage classes based on usage patterns without manual intervention.
Transition to IA: Files not accessed in Standard storage for 30 days automatically move to Infrequent Access storage, optimized for quarterly access patterns.
Transition to Archive: Files not accessed in Standard storage for 90 days automatically move to Archive storage, optimized for yearly or less frequent access.
Transition to Standard: Configurable policy determines whether files move back to Standard storage when accessed from IA or Archive, with default behavior keeping files in their current class.
Use Cases​
Content Management and Web Serving: Share website files, media assets, and content across multiple web servers for scalable content delivery and management.
Data Analytics and Big Data: Provide shared storage for analytics workloads where multiple compute instances need concurrent access to large datasets for processing.
Container Storage: Serve as persistent storage for containerized applications running on Amazon ECS, EKS, or AWS Fargate that require shared file access.
Development and Testing: Enable development teams to share code repositories, build artifacts, and configuration files across multiple development environments.
Backup and Archiving: Store backup files and archives that need to be accessible from multiple systems while leveraging lifecycle policies for cost optimization.
Machine Learning Workloads: Provide shared access to training datasets and model files for distributed machine learning training across multiple compute instances.
Enterprise Applications: Support legacy applications that require NFS-based shared file storage for configuration files, logs, and application data.
Key Features​
- NFS Protocol Compatibility: Works with standard Linux file system tools and applications.
- Pay-for-Use Model: Only pay for storage actually used with no minimum fees.
- Concurrent Access: Thousands of EC2 instances can access files simultaneously.
- Cross-AZ Connectivity: Mount file systems across multiple Availability Zones.
- On-Premises Integration: Connect on-premises servers via AWS Direct Connect or VPN.
Benefits: EFS provides petabyte-scale shared file storage with automatic scaling, Multi-AZ durability, and cost optimization through intelligent lifecycle management.
Use case: Ideal for content repositories, web serving, data analytics, container storage, and any application requiring shared file access across multiple instances.