Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, elastic file
system for Linux-based workloads for
use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It is built to scale on
demand to petabytes without disrupting
applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so
your applications have the storage
they need – when they need it. It is designed to provide massively parallel shared
access to thousands of Amazon EC2
instances, enabling your applications to achieve high levels of aggregate throughput
and IOPS with consistent low
latencies. Amazon EFS is a fully managed service that requires no changes to your
existing applications and tools,
providing access through a standard file system interface for seamless integration.
There is a Standard and an
Infrequent Access storage class available with Amazon EFS. Using EFS Lifecycle
Management, files not accessed according
to the lifecycle policy you choose will automatically be moved to a cost-optimized
Infrequent Access storage class,
giving you a simple way to store and access active and infrequently accessed file
system data in the same file system
while reducing storage costs by up to 85%. Amazon EFS is a regional service storing
data within and across multiple
Availability Zones (AZs) for high availability and durability. You can access your
file systems across AZs, regions, and
VPCs and share files between thousands of Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises
servers via AWS Direct Connect or AWS
VPN.
Amazon EFS is well suited to support a broad spectrum of use cases from highly
parallelized, scale-out workloads that
require the highest possible throughput to single-threaded, latency-sensitive
workloads. Use cases such as
lift-and-shift enterprise applications, big data analytics, web serving and content
management, application development
and testing, media and entertainment workflows, database backups, and container
storage.
