Elastic File System

Solution Architect Associate

  • File storage service for EC2 instances. Provides simple interface for quickly creating file systems.
  • Storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking as you need it rather than paying for larger than needed volumes
  • Supports NFSv4 Protocol (i.e no Windows)
  • You only pay for storage you use, charged 30 cents per GB
  • Can scale up to PetaByte
  • Can support thousands of NFS connections
  • Data is stored across multiple AZs within a region
  • Block based storage, not object based storage like S3
  • Read after write consistency
  • Big difference between this and EBS is that you can mount the same EFS to more than a single EC2 instance at a time (likely on exam!!)
  • The command to mount this to EC2 instances can be found in the EFS
  • Super useful to mount Apache servers /var/www/html to the EFS rather than having to download entire websites when each instance spins up, especially when used with Auto Scaling.
  • You can provide user level or directory level permissions
  • Two storage tiers
    • Standard
    • Infrequently Accessed

FSx

  • Provides a fully managed, native file system for Windows
  • Built on Windows Server
  • Useful for migrating Windows workloads to AWS
  • Runs SMB based file services
  • Doing things like migrating Sharepoint, etc. are good candidates for FSx

FSx for Lustre

  • Optimized for compute intensive workloads.
  • Essentially anything to do with AI or machine learning.
  • Provides amazing performance capabilities.
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