EFS - Elastic File System

  • Managed NFS (network file system) which can be mounted on many EC2 Instances

  • EFS works with EC2 instances in multi-AZ

  • Highly available, scalable, expensive (3xgp2), pay per use

  • 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 which has a standard file API

  • File system scales automatically, pay-per-use, no capacity planning

EFS - Performance & Storage 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 - 1TB = 50MiB/s + burst of up to 100MiB/s

    • Provisioned - set your throughput regardless of storage size, e.g. 1GiB/s for 1TB storage

    • Elastic - automatically scales throughput up or down based on your workloads

      • Up to 3GiB/s for reads, 1GiB/s writes

      • Used for unpredictable workloads

EFS - Storage Classes

  • Storage Tiers (Lifecycle managment feature - move file after N days)

    • Standard: for frequently accessed files

    • Infrequent access (EFS-IA): cost to retrieve files, lower price to store. Enable with a Lifecycle Policy

  • Availability and Durability

    • Standard: Multi-AZ, great for prod

    • One Zone: One AZ, great for dev, backup enabled by default, compatible with IA (EFS One Zone-IA)

  • Over 90% in cost savings

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