Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a file storage service for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Amazon EFS is easy to use and provides a simple interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.
Amazon EFS supports the Network File System version 4 (NFSv4) protocol, so the applications and tools that you use today work seamlessly with Amazon EFS. Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system at the same time, providing a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one instance.
With Amazon EFS, you pay only for the storage used by your file system. You don't need to provision storage in advance and there is no minimum fee or setup cost. Amazon EFS is designed for a wide variety of use cases like content repositories, development environments, and home directories. With on-demand scaling and performance, Amazon EFS is an ideal solution for Big Data applications.
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Amazon EFS supports the Network File System version 4 (NFSv4) protocol, so the applications and tools that you use today work seamlessly with Amazon EFS. Amazon EFS file systems support standard file system semantics, and Amazon EC2 instances mount Amazon EFS file systems using standard file system mount tools.
Amazon EFS automatically scales your file system storage capacity up or down as you add or remove files without disrupting your applications, ensuring you always have the storage you need while reducing time-consuming administration tasks.
Amazon EFS has a simple web services interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. The service manages all the file storage infrastructure for you, avoiding the complexity of deploying, patching, and maintaining complex file system deployments.
Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system, so applications that scale beyond a single instance can access a file system. Amazon EC2 instances running in multiple Availability Zones (AZs) within the same region can access the file system, so that many users can access and share a common data source.
Amazon EFS is SSD-based, and is designed to provide the throughput, IOPS, and low latency needed for a broad range of workloads. With Amazon EFS, throughput and IOPS scale as a file system grows, and file operations are delivered with consistent, low latencies.
Amazon EFS provides the capacity you need, when you need it, without having to provision storage in advance. You pay for what you use, with no minimum commitments or up-front fees.
Amazon EFS is designed to be durable and highly available. Each Amazon EFS file system object (i.e. directory, file, and link) is redundantly stored across multiple Availability Zones.
Amazon EFS allows you to tightly control access to your file systems. Only Amazon EC2 instances within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) you specify can directly access your Amazon EFS file systems. Amazon VPC security groups and network access control lists allow you to manage network access to your Amazon EFS file systems. At the file and directory level, Amazon EFS supports user and group read/write/execute permissions. The service is also integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which can be used to control access to Amazon EFS APIs as well as manage resource-level permissions.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers storage services to support a wide range of cloud storage workloads. Amazon EFS is an elastic, shared file storage service for Amazon EC2, and provides a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one instance that need to access a common file system. Amazon S3 is a secure, durable, highly scalable, object storage service that is designed to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service for data archiving and online backup. Amazon EBS provides block storage that allows you to create storage volumes that can be attached to one Amazon EC2 instance at a time.
Amazon EFS can be used as a durable, high throughput file system for content management systems that store and serve information for a range of applications like web sites, online publications, and archives.
Amazon EFS can be used as storage for development and test environments that can scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes accessing a common set of source files, binaries, and other resources.
Amazon EFS provides the scale and performance required for Big Data applications that require high throughput to compute nodes coupled with read-after-write consistency and low-latency file operations.
Amazon EFS can provide storage for organizations that have many users that need to access and share common data sets. An administrator can use Amazon EFS to create a file system accessible to individuals across an organization and establish permissions for users and groups at the file or directory level.
