What Is EFS In AWS

In this AWS article, we will discuss What Is EFS In AWS, and along with that, we will also discuss a few other topics as below.

Benefits Of Amazon EFS
AWS EFS VS S3
AWS EFS For Windows
What is difference between EFS and EBS?
AWS EFS VS FSX
AWS EFS Pricing

EFS or Amazon Elastic File System is a simple and serverless file system.

Provides you the wonderful capability of sharing data without bothering how storage is getting managed or provisioned.

AWS EFS-Tutorial

The interesting feature of EFS is that it scales automatically when the situation demands. It expands or reduces the file systems based on the situation.

It can work seamlessly with other AWS cloud services and AWS resources.

Amazon Elastic File System provides you 4 types of storage classes. 2 from Standard storage classes and another 2 are from One Zone storage classes and those help you to create the file systems.

Amazon EFS Standard
Amazon EFS Standard-Infrequent Access (EFS Standard-IA)
Amazon EFS One Zone
Amazon EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access (EFS One Zone-IA)

Benefits Of Amazon EFS

Let’s discuss here a few key benefits of Amazon Elastic File System.

Fully managed Service

Amazon Elastic File System is a fully managed service that helps you with the capability of creating and configuring the file systems.

The interesting part here is since it is a fully managed service, Amazon takes care of the maintenance, patching, and deployment, etc, You no need to take any headache for this, you just have to use the service.

Highly Secure

Amazon Elastic File System provides you the ability to access your files with high security. It also makes sure that your data is safe by encrypting them with advanced algorithms.

You have the provision to control the access to your EFS file systems with Amazon VPC, AWS IAM, and POSIX permissions, etc.

Reduce Cost

Amazon Elastic File System is based on the pay only for what you use model. Absolutely no up-front fees.

Since you are paying only for what you are using, so you can save a lot of money for storage and file systems.

Highly Scalable

Amazon EFS is highly scalable in nature. It automatically increases or decreases the storage capacity of your file system based on your need at the same time, making sure that it is not affecting the performance of your Application.

Your job is just to create the file system and keep adding or deleting the files, growing and reducing the storage capacity of your file system will be taken care of by Amazon EFS.

Low latency

Amazon EFS is designed to provide low latency and that helps the users to get a faster response. Which is another great feature of the Amazon Elastic File System.

Work seamlessly with AWS services

Amazon Elastic File System can easily integrate with other AWS resources. work seamlessly with other AWS resources and services such as Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Lambda, ECS, AWS Fargate, etc.

This is why to choose Amazon EFS?.

Use Cases Of Amazon EFS

Well, now, the question here is, what are the use cases of Amazon EFS.

Backup your Database

Organization can store their database backups in the cloud for safer side during updates.

Application development and testing

Amazon EFS provides you with a shared file system that can be used to share your code and class files and other components with different AWS compute resources.

Machine Learning (ML)

High performance, scalability, consistency are key factors needed for ML. Amazon EFS provides you with all these features. Data scientists can easily create their own environments to store their models, training materials, and all other critical data safely.

Enterprise Applications Support

Because of high availability, scalability, etc the file for the enterprise application can be stored easily.

Even, it is easy to migrate the enterprise application from on-premises to AWS cloud with the help of Amazon EFS.

AWS EFS VS S3

Well, let’s discuss a few key differences between AWS EFS and S3.

AWS EFS	S3
AWS EFS is a file storage service.	Where as S3 is an object storage service.
Best to use when you have a requirement of using a shared file storage option.	When you have the requirement to store storing long-term data, S3 is the best choice there.
This is highly scalable.	A bit complex object storage system.
AWS EFS is faster than S3.	S3 is slower compare to AWS EFS.
You can share files in multiple regions with multiple EC2 instances.	S3 can be accessed from anywhere.
AWS EFS is more expensive compare to S3.	S3 is cheaper compare to AWS EFS.

What is difference between EFS and EBS?

Well, we will discuss here the difference between EFS and EBS.

EFS	EBS
AWS EFS is a file storage service.	EBS is a block storage service.
Best to use when you have a requirement of using a shared file storage option.	When you have a single instance and you have the requirement to use a best-performed storage service, there EBS is the choice for you.
This is highly scalable.	EBS is hardly scalable.
Slower as compare to EBS.	EBS is faster than EFS.
Accessible to multiple EC2 instances.	This is not accessible to multiple EC2 instances.
The Data that you have stored in AWS EFS stays in the region.	Here, it is the same Availability Zone.
EFS is highly available.	It is 99.99% available.
No limit	In the case of EBS, 16 TB is the maximum storage size as of now.

AWS EFS VS FSX

Let’s find the key differences between AWS EFS and AWS FSX.

AWS EFS	FSX
It is a NAS filer for EC2 instances which is based on NFS.	it’s a Windows server that runs on Windows SMB based file service.
It’s not suitable for Windows.	FSX runs on Windows.
AWS EFS is more expensive compare to FSX.	FSX is less expensive.

AWS EFS Pricing

Below are a few interesting points on AWS EFS Pricing model.

You just have to pay only for the storage or resource that you are using and based on the storage class you are actually using.
No need to worry about any set-up charges.
No worries about any minimum fee.

The AWS EFS Pricing structure is also based on region.

If you will consider for US West(Oregon) region, below is the pricing structure based on the types of storage class you are using.

Types Of Storage Class	You Need To Pay
For, Standard Storage (GB-Month).	You need to pay $0.30.
For, Standard-Infrequent Access Storage (GB-Month).	You just need to pay $0.025.
For, One Zone Storage (GB-Month).	You just need to pay $0.16.
For, One Zone-Infrequent Access Storage (GB-Month)	You need to pay $0.0133.
In the case of, Infrequent Access Requests (per GB transferred)	Need to pay only $0.01.
For, Provisioned Throughput (MB/s-Month)	You need to pay $6.00.

For the complete pricing details for all the other regions, you can check the AWS EFS pricing now.

File Systems Using Lifecycle Management

This is available for some specific regions.

Specific Regions	For Standard (Pricing)	For One Zone (Pricing)
For US West (Oregon)	You need to pay $0.08.	You need to pay $0.043.
In case of, US East (N. Virginia)	You need to pay $0.08.	You need to pay $0.043.
For, Asia Pacific (Seoul)	You need to pay $0.09.	You need to pay $0.047.
For, Africa (Cape Town)	You need to pay $0.1.	You need to pay $0.054.
In the case of Canada (Central)	You need to pay $0.09.	You need to pay $0.047.
For, AWS GovCloud (US-East)	You need to pay $0.11.	You need to pay $0.056.
In the case of Europe (Ireland)	You need to pay $0.09.	You need to pay $0.046.

Is EFS safe?

Yes, EFS is highly secure

AWS EFS For Windows

It’s not possible to use AWS EFS on Windows instance. It’s not supported on Windows.

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Wrapping Up

In this article, we have discussed What Is EFS In AWS and along with that we have also discussed the below topics

What Is EFS In AWS
Benefits Of Amazon EFS
AWS EFS VS S3
AWS EFS For Windows
What is difference between EFS and EBS?
AWS EFS VS FSX
AWS EFS Pricing

Hope you enjoyed this article !!!