AWS EFS (Elastic File System) is managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on many EC2.
- AWS EFS works with EC2 instances in multi-AZ.
- It is highly available, scalable, expensive (3x gp2), pay per use.
- Use cases: content management, web serving, data sharing, WordPress.
- Uses NFSv4.1protocol
- 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!
AWS 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)
Storage Tiers (lifecycle management feature – move file after N days):
- Standard: for frequently accessed files
- Infrequent access (EFS-IA): cost to retrieve files, lower price to store
EBS vs EFS
| AWS EBS | AWS EFS |
| EBS volumes:
can be attached to only one instance at a time are locked at the Availability Zone (AZ) level gp2: IO increases if the disk size increases io1: can increase IO independently To migrate an EBS volume across AZ Take a snapshot Restore the snapshot to another AZ EBS backups use IO and you shouldn’t run them while your application is handling a lot of traffic Root EBS Volumes of instances get terminated by default if the EC2 instance gets terminated. (you can disable that) |
Mounting 100s of instances across AZ
EFS share website files (WordPress) Only for Linux Instances (POSIX) EFS has a higher price point than EBS Can leverage EFS-IA for cost savings |
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