Skip to content

EFS Overview (Elastic File System)ΒΆ

  • Managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on many EC2 instances
  • EFS works with EC2 instances in multi-AZ
  • Highly available, scalable, expensive (3xgp2), pay per use

Use cases: content management, web serving, data sharing, Wordpress - Uses NFSv4.1 protocol - Uses security group to controll access to EFS - Compatible with Linux based AMI (not windows) - Encryption at rest using KMS - POSIX file system (~Linux) that has a standard file API - File system scales automatically, pay-peruse, no capacity planning.


  • EFS Scale
    • 1000s of concurrent NFS clients, 10GB+/s throughput
    • Grow to petabyte-scale network file system, automatically
  • Performance mode (set at EFS creation time)
    • General purpose (defaullt): latency-sensitive use cases (web server, CMS, etc...)
    • Max I/O - higher latency, throughput, highly parralel (big data, media processing)
  • Throughput mode
    • Bursting (1TB = 50MiB/s + burst of up to 100MiB/s)
    • Provisioned: set your throughput regardless of storage size, ex: 1Gib/s for 1TB storage
  • Storage Tiers (lifecycle management feature - move file after N days)
    • Standard: for frequently accessed files
    • Infrequent acces (EFS-IA): cost to retrieve files, lower price to store