Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides simple, scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Amazon EFS is easy to use and offers 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.
When mounted on Amazon EC2 instances, an Amazon EFS file system provides a standard file system interface and file system access semantics, allowing you to seamlessly integrate Amazon EFS with your existing applications and tools. Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system at the same time, allowing Amazon EFS to provide a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one Amazon EC2 instance.
You can mount your Amazon EFS file systems on your on-premises datacenter servers when connected to your Amazon VPC with AWS Direct Connect. You can mount your EFS file systems on on-premises servers to migrate data sets to EFS, enable cloud bursting scenarios, or backup your on-premises data to EFS.
Amazon EFS is designed for high availability and durability, and provides performance for a broad spectrum of use cases, including web serving and content management, enterprise applications, media and entertainment processing workflows, home directories, database backups, developer tools, container storage, and big data and analytics applications.
Amazon EFS provides a file system interface (using standard operating system file I/O APIs) and file system access semantics (such as strong data consistency and file locking). Amazon EC2 instances mount Amazon EFS file systems via the NFSv4.1 protocol, using standard operating system mount commands. You can also mount Amazon EFS file systems on your on-premises datacenter servers via the NFSv4.1 protocol when connected to your Amazon VPC with AWS Direct Connect.
Amazon EFS automatically and instantly scales your file system storage capacity up or down as you add or remove files without disrupting your applications, giving you just the storage you need while also 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 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 highly available and durable. 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 through POSIX permissions. Use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to manage network access. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), to control access to Amazon EFS APIs. Encrypt your data at rest using keys managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
Amazon EFS provides the scalability, elasticity, availability, and durability to be the file store for enterprise applications and for applications delivered as a service. Its standard file system interface and file system semantics make it easy to migrate
enterprise applications to the AWS cloud or to build new ones.
Toast is a restaurant technology platform that enables customers to simplify and streamline all elements of their operation and deliver a better guest experience. Toast offers a mobile, cloud-based point of sale system (POS) that easily integrates with front-of-house, back-of-house, online ordering, gift card and loyalty programs, as well as labor and sales reporting.
"Like many fast-growing companies, Toast is always looking for ways to maximize our resources so we can develop the best product possible for our restaurant customers. Amazon EFS did just that; it jump-started our distributed processing frameworks, resulting in significant parallelization and throughput gain for the workloads we are running. With Amazon EFS, we got an easy-to-attach, cross-AZ shared file system with minimal operational efforts.”
-- Martin Kressirer, Senior Principal Engineer
Atlassian delivers team collaboration and development tools like JIRA, Confluence, HipChat, and Bitbucket to more than 57,000 customers.
“We are growing by leaps and bounds, and our core offering is all about better support delivery. During the course of developing our next-generation internal support system, we never wanted to worry about scale again, yet we had existing architectural commitments that meant a distributed file solution was required. Atlassian chose Amazon EFS because it was the only option available that scaled both capacity and performance – without the up-front payments or the management overhead of traditional models. This allows our support teams to focus on what matters most - helping our customers."
--Sri Viswanath, CTO
Amazon EFS can be used as a highly-available, high performance file system for content management systems that store and serve information for a range of applications like web sites, home directories, online publications, and archives.
Seeking Alpha is a platform for investment research, with broad coverage of stocks, asset classes, ETFs and investment strategy.
“Seeking Alpha subscribers rely on us for accurate trading information. Amazon EFS helps us manage the thousands of web pages on our site. It also helps us manage the traffic spikes generated by financial market events, and ensure that every bit of content requested during these spikes is quickly and reliably delivered to our subscribers.”
-- Asi Segal, CTO
Zend was founded by key contributors to PHP and provides commercial PHP solutions and support for development leaders, DevOps, and developers. Amazon EFS provides Zend customers with a highly-available and performant storage platform for their PHP-based sites.
“As our customers move web sites to AWS, they need a highly available, highly scalable, easy to use, and affordable file system, and we found Amazon EFS ideal for customer-facing websites.”
-- Boaz Ziniman, Senior Director for Cloud Strategy
Get started with Amazon EFS by creating a file system in just a few clicks.
Requires Amazon EC2. Free tier provides 5GB/month.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) also offers other cloud storage services to support a wide range of architectures, workloads and data transfer needs.
