Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system for use with Amazon Web Services 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, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth.

Amazon EFS offers customers the choice of creating file systems using regional storage classes, where data is stored within and across multiple Availability Zones (AZs), for workloads that require the highest levels of availability and durability, and file systems that use One Zone storage classes, which store data redundantly within just a single AZ at a 47% lower price, for workloads that don’t require regional redundancy, like development, build and staging environments.

Amazon EFS offers four storage classes: two regional storage classes, Amazon EFS Standard, and Amazon EFS Standard-Infrequent Access (EFS Standard-IA), and two One Zone storage classes, Amazon EFS One Zone, and Amazon EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access (EFS One Zone-IA). EFS Standard-IA and EFS One Zone-IA provide price/performance that is cost-optimized for files not accessed every day. By simply enabling EFS Lifecycle Management on your file system, files not accessed according to the lifecycle policy you choose will be automatically and transparently moved into EFS Standard-IA or EFS One Zone-IA, depending on whether your file system uses regional or One Zone storage classes. The EFS One Zone-IA storage class costs only ¥0.107/GB-month*, and EFS Standard-IA costs only ¥0.2/GB-month**.

While workload patterns vary, customers typically find that 80% of files are infrequently accessed (and suitable for Infrequent Access storage classes), and 20% are actively used, resulting in an effective storage cost as low as ¥0.3136/GB-month* for file systems using One Zone storage classes, and ¥0.589/GB-month** for file systems using regional storage classes. Amazon EFS transparently serves files from both frequently accessed and infrequently accessed storage classes in a common file system namespace.

Amazon EFS is designed to provide massively parallel shared access to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, and shared storage for Amazon Web Services containers and serverless compute models, enabling your applications to achieve high levels of aggregate throughput and IOPS with consistent low latencies.

Amazon EFS is well suited to support a broad spectrum of use cases, such as web serving and content management, big data analytics, application development and testing, media and entertainment workflows, database backups, and storage for containerized and serverless applications. You can use Amazon EFS to migrate existing enterprise applications to the Amazon Web Services Cloud.

Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon Lambda functions, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) containers can access your file system across AZs, Amazon Web Services China regions, and VPCs, while on-premises servers can access using Amazon Direct Connect.

*pricing in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD, assumes 80% of your storage in EFS One Zone-IA

**pricing in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD, assumes 80% of your storage in EFS IA

*pricing in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD, assumes 80% of your storage in EFS One Zone-IA

**pricing in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD, assumes 80% of your storage in EFS IA

Benefits

POSIX-Compliant Shared File Storage

Amazon EFS provides secure access for thousands of connections for Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon Lambda functions, Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and on-premises servers simultaneously using a traditional file permissions model, file locking capabilities, and hierarchical directory structure via the NFSv4 protocol. Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon Lambda functions, Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS can access your file system across AZs, Amazon Web Services China regions, and VPCs, while on-premises servers can access using Amazon Direct Connect.

Cost-Effective

With Amazon EFS file storage, you pay only for what you use. There is no need to provision storage in advance and there are no minimum commitments or up-front fees. With Amazon EFS Lifecycle Management, you can automatically move files accessed less frequently to a cost-optimized storage class, reducing file storage costs by up to 92%. With Amazon EFS One Zone storage classes, you can choose an additional 47% savings by storing your data in a single-AZ, for your workloads that do not require the multi-AZ resilience of regional storage classes. You can also use Amazon Budgets to monitor your file system costs.

Scalable Performance

Amazon EFS is designed to provide the throughput, IOPS, and low latency needed for Linux workloads. Throughput and IOPS scale as a file system grows and can burst to higher throughput levels for short periods of time to support the unpredictable performance needs of file workloads. For the most demanding workloads, Amazon EFS can support performance over 10 GB/sec and more than 500,000 IOPS.

Security and Compliance

Amazon EFS allows you to securely access your files using your existing security infrastructure. Control access to your Amazon EFS file systems with POSIX permissions, Amazon VPC, and Amazon IAM. Secure your data by encrypting your data at rest and in transit. Amazon EFS also meets many eligibility and compliance requirements to help you meet your regulatory needs.

Dynamic Elasticity

Amazon EFS automatically and instantly scales your file system storage capacity up or down as you add or remove files without disrupting your applications, dynamically providing the storage capacity you need as you need it. You simply create your file system and start adding files with no need to provision storage in advance.

Fully Managed

Amazon EFS is a fully managed service providing shared file system storage for Linux workloads. It provides a simple interface allowing you to create and configure file systems quickly and manages the file storage infrastructure for you, removing the complexity of deploying, patching, and maintaining the underpinnings of a file system.

Benefits

POSIX-compliant Shared File Storage

Cost-Effective

Scalable Performance

Security and Compliance

Dynamic Elasticity

Fully Managed

How It Works

Use Cases

Lift-and-Shift Enterprise Applications

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, file system permissions, and directory hierarchy make it easy to migrate enterprise applications from on-premises to the Amazon Web Services cloud or to build new ones.

Web Serving & Content Management

Amazon EFS provides a durable, high throughput file system for content management systems and web serving applications that store and serve information for a range of applications like websites, online publications, and archives. Since Amazon EFS adheres to the expected file system directory structure, file naming conventions, and permissions that web developers are accustomed to, it can easily integrate with web applications.

Application Testing & Development

Amazon EFS provides your development environments a common storage repository that gives you the ability to share code and other files in a secure and organized way. You can provision, duplicate, scale, or archive your test, development, and production environments with a few clicks, enabling your organization to be more agile and responsive to customer needs. Amazon EFS delivers a scalable and highly available solution that is ideal for testing and development workloads.

Database Backups

Amazon EFS presents a standard file system that can be easily mounted with NFSv4 from database servers. This provides an ideal platform to create portable database backups using native application tools or enterprise backup applications. Many businesses want to take advantage of the flexibility of storing database backups in the cloud either for temporary protection during updates or for development and test.

Container Storage

Amazon EFS is ideal for container storage providing persistent shared access to a common file repository. Containers are an integral part of building microservices because they’re quick to provision, easily portable, and provide process isolation. Containers that need access to the original data each time they start, can take advantage of a shared file system that they can connect to regardless of which instance they’re running on.

Media & Entertainment

Media workflows like video editing, studio production, broadcast processing, sound design, and rendering often depend on shared storage to manipulate large files. Amazon EFS provides a strong data consistency model with high throughput and shared file access which can cut the time it takes to perform these jobs and consolidate multiple local file repositories into a single location for all users.