Amazon EFS features

Amazon EFS is a serverless storage service that provides a fully managed shared file system storage for Linux workloads, without provisioning or managing storage servers. Amazon EFS makes it simple to create and configure file systems. You don't have to worry about managing file servers or storage, updating hardware, configuring software, or performing backups. In seconds, you can create a fully managed file system by using the Amazon Web Services Management Console, the Amazon Web Services CLI, or an Amazon Web Services SDK.

EFS Replication allows you to replicate your file system data to another Amazon Web Services Region or within the same Region in a few clicks, without requiring additional infrastructure or needing a custom process to monitor and synchronize data changes. Organizations in regulated industries are often subject to compliance requirements that mandate storing secondary data copies several hundred miles away from the original. Amazon EFS Replication automatically and transparently replicates your data to a second file system in a Region or AZ of your choice. You can use the Amazon EFS console, Amazon CLI, and APIs to enable replication on an existing file system. EFS replication is continuous and designed to provide a recovery point objective (RPO) and a recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes, enabling you to meet your compliance and business continuity goals.

You can also set up your destination file system independent of your source file system. You can select the destination file system’s lifecycle management policy, backup policies, provisioned throughput, mount targets, and access points independent of the source file system. For example, you can optimize the destination file system storage costs by enabling EFS Lifecycle Management with a shorter age-off policy (such as 7 days) when compared to the source file system’s age-off policy (such as 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days). You can also replicate from a source file system created using Amazon EFS Standard storage classes to a destination file system created using Amazon EFS One Zone storage classes and the other way around.

Amazon Backup is a fully managed backup service that makes it easy to centrally manage and automate backups of your Amazon EFS file systems, removing the need for costly custom solutions and manual processes. Amazon Backup goes beyond backing up EFS and centralizes the backup of data across other Amazon Web Services services in the cloud as well as on premises. As applications move to the cloud, their data can become distributed across multiple services, making it difficult to manage and consolidate backup activity without creating custom scripts and manual processes. Using Amazon Backup, you can centrally configure and audit Amazon Web Services resources, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor backup activity.

Amazon EFS offers Standard and One Zone storage classes for both frequently accessed and infrequently accessed files. The Standard and One Zone storage classes are performance-optimized to deliver consistent low latencies. The Amazon EFS Standard-Infrequent Access (EFS Standard-IA) and Amazon EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access (EFS One Zone-IA) storage classes are cost-optimized for files accessed less frequently. You can start saving on your storage costs by simply enabling EFS Lifecycle Management for your file system and choosing an age-off policy (7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days). Additionally, you can also set a policy to automatically move files from the cost-optimized infrequent access storage classes to the performance-optimized storage classes if files are accessed. With EFS Lifecycle Management policies enabled, files automatically move between Amazon EFS Standard storage and EFS Standard-IA storage, or between Amazon EFS One Zone storage and EFS One Zone-IA storage, reducing storage costs by up to 91%. 

Using the industry accepted estimate that 20% of data is actively used and 80% is infrequently accessed, you can store your files on EFS at an effective price of ¥0.3136/GB-month (20% * ¥1.14/GB-month for files stored on EFS One Zone + 80% * ¥0.107/GB-month for files stored on EFS One Zone-IA = ¥0.3136/GB-month)*, or an effective price of ¥0.589/GB-month (20% * ¥2.145/GB-month for files stored on regional EFS Standard + 80% * ¥0.2/GB-month for files stored on EFS Standard-IA = ¥0.589/GB-month)

*****pricing in Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) region, operated by NWCD, assumes 20% of your storage in EFS Standard-IA

You can control network access to your file systems using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) security group rules, and you can control application access to your file systems using Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and Amazon EFS Access Points. Amazon EFS satisfies many eligibility and compliance requirements to help you meet your regulatory needs.

Amazon EFS is designed to provide the throughput, IOPS, and low latency needed for a broad range of 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 over 500,000 IOPS.

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

Amazon EFS is designed to provide the throughput, IOPS, and low latency needed for a broad range of workloads and offers two performance modes for file systems using regional storage classes: General Purpose and Max I/O. General Purpose provides the lowest latency per file system operation and can achieve this for random or sequential IO patterns. Max I/O can scale to higher levels of aggregate throughput and operations per second and is ideal for highly parallelized applications that can scale out to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances. File systems using One Zone storage classes only support General Purpose performance mode.

Amazon EFS is integrated with Amazon Web Services containers and serverless compute services that require shared storage for latency-sensitive, and IOPS-heavy workloads at any scale. In a single step, Amazon EFS provides applications running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Fargate, and Amazon Lambda, access to shared file systems for stateful workloads.