Amazon EFS Features

Amazon EFS is a fully managed service providing NFS shared file system storage for Linux workloads. Amazon EFS makes it quick and efficient to create and configure file systems. You needn’t worry about managing file servers or storage, updating hardware, configuring software, or performing backups. In seconds, create a fully managed file system using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or an AWS SDK.

Amazon EFS is designed for 99.999999999 percent (11 nines) of durability and up to 99.99 percent (4 nines) of availability. By default, Amazon EFS redundantly stores every file system object (directory, file, and link) across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) for file systems using Amazon EFS Standard storage classes. If you select Amazon EFS One Zone storage classes, your data is redundantly stored within a single AZ. Amazon EFS is designed to sustain concurrent device failures by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. You can access a file system that uses EFS Standard storage classes concurrently from all AZs in the AWS Region where it’s located. You can architect your application for failover from one AZ to other AZs in the Region for a high level of application availability. Mount targets are designed to be highly available within an AZ for all Amazon EFS storage classes.

With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files to dynamically provide storage capacity to your applications as needed. With elastic capacity, provisioning is unnecessary, and you’re billed only for what you use. Amazon EFS is designed to be highly scalable both in storage capacity and throughput performance, growing to petabyte scale with massively parallel access from EC2 instances.

Amazon EFS is designed to provide the throughput, I/O operations per second (IOPS), and low latency necessary for a broad range of workloads. By default, Amazon EFS performance is designed to scale as your file system grows and can burst to higher throughput levels for short periods of time, supporting the unpredictable performance needs of file workloads. For more performance-intensive workloads, you can choose to deliver performance independent of your file system size with elastic throughput or provisioned throughput.

Amazon EFS offers Standard and One Zone storage classes for both frequently accessed and infrequently accessed files. Standard and One Zone storage classes are performance-optimized to deliver consistently 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. Start saving on storage costs with EFS Lifecycle Management and an age-off policy (1, 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days). Additionally, set a policy to automatically move accessed files from the cost-optimized infrequent access storage classes to the performance-optimized storage classes. With EFS Lifecycle Management, automatically move files between EFS Standard and EFS Standard-IA storage, or between EFS One Zone and EFS One Zone-IA storage, reducing costs up to 92%.

By default, Amazon EFS file systems are built to provide throughput that scales with the amount of storage in your file system and supports bursting to higher levels for up to 12 hours a day.

For throughput-intensive workloads, EFS offers two options for delivering higher levels of performance independent of your file system storage: elastic throughput and provisioned throughput. Use elastic throughput if you’re unsure of your application’s peak throughput needs. With elastic throughput, performance automatically scales with your workload activity, and you only pay for the throughput you use. Use provisioned throughput if you know your workload’s peak throughput requirements and you expect your workload to consume a higher share of your application’s peak throughput capacity. Provisioned throughput is designed to offer the highest levels of throughput consistency while providing a predictable billing experience.

Amazon EFS Replication can replicate your file system data to another AWS Region or within the same Region in a few steps. This replication requires no additional infrastructure or 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 is designed to automatically and transparently replicate your data to a second file system in a Region or AZ of your choice. You can use the Amazon EFS console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and APIs to activate replication on an existing file system. Amazon EFS Replication is nearly continuous, designed to provide a recovery point objective (RPO) and a recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes.

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, improve destination file system storage costs with a shorter age-off policy (such as 1 day). You can also replicate from a source file system created using EFS Standard storage classes to a destination file system created using EFS One Zone storage classes.

AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that centrally manages and automates backups of your Amazon EFS file systems, removing the need for costly custom solutions and manual processes. AWS Backup goes beyond backing up EFS and centralizes the backup of data across other AWS services in the cloud and 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 AWS Backup, you can centrally configure and audit AWS resources, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor backup activity.

Amazon EFS provides secure access for thousands of connections for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, as well as AWS container and serverless compute services. Amazon EFS also simultaneously supports on-premises servers using a traditional file permissions model, file locking, and hierarchical directory structure through the NFS v4 protocol. Amazon EC2 instances can access your file system across AZs and Regions while on-premises servers can access it via AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN services.

Amazon EFS runs on AWS 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 (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda with access to shared file systems for stateful workloads.

Control network access to your file systems using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) security group rules, and application access to your file systems using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and Amazon EFS Access Points. AWS is certified under numerous certification programs to help you achieve your compliance goals. See this list of compliance programs in scope for Amazon EFS for more information.

Shared file system with NFS v4.0 and v4.1 support

Amazon EFS is designed to provide secure access for thousands of connections for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, as well as AWS container and serverless compute services. Amazon EFS also simultaneously supports on-premises servers using a traditional file permissions model, file locking, and hierarchical directory structure through the NFS v4 protocol. Amazon EC2 instances can access your file system across AZs and Regions while on-premises servers can access it through AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN services.

Amazon EFS provides a comprehensive encryption solution to help you secure both your stored data and data in flight. Data at rest is transparently encrypted using encryption keys managed by the AWS Key Management Service (KMS), eliminating the need to build and maintain a key management infrastructure. Encryption of data in transit uses industry-standard Transport Layer Security (TLS) to help you secure network traffic, without the need to modify your applications. Refer to the user documentation on encryption for more information about encrypting file system data.

AWS DataSync is a managed data transfer service that makes it faster and simpler to move data between on-premises storage and Amazon EFS. Use DataSync to transfer active datasets over the internet or AWS Direct Connect up to 10 times faster than open-source tools, without the need to modify your applications. Use the service for one-time data migrations, ongoing workflows with periodic synchronization, or replication for data protection and recovery. DataSync automatically manages many tasks known to slow down migrations or burden IT operations, including infrastructure management, encryption, data validation, and data transfer orchestration.

AWS Transfer Family provides fully managed support for file transfers directly into and out of Amazon EFS. With support for Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), File Transfer Protocol over SSL (FTPS), and File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Transfer Family helps you seamlessly migrate your file transfer workflows to AWS.