What is AWS EFS? – Features, Advantages & More
Did you know that Amazon Elastic File Systems (EFS) ranks sixth among the top public cloud storage services? According to a recent survey, over 133 companies use Amazon EFS as a storage infrastructure tool. Competing with several popular storage providers, Amazon EFS holds a market share of 0.08% in the storage infrastructure sector.
Therefore it is evident how Amazon EFS is in all-the-time demand these days. In this blog, let’s understand what is AWS EFS, its features, advantages, and the various operation modes present in the platform.
What is Amazon Elastic File System?
Amazon Elastic File System is a cloud-based storage facility designed for workloads and applications running on the AWS public clouds. The AWS EFS automatically manages and administers several EFS infrastructures distributed across an infinite number of servers.
Amazon’s Elastic File System is a flexible and scalable file-sharing service. It can be easily implemented in various operations across multiple domains. An EFS can be linked effectively to several AWS or Amazon Web Services computational instances as well as on-site servers. It also provides a shared facility for programs and stored information inside many types of environments.
Amazon EFS provides highly reliable and robust services to several EC2 instances connected to the server. The EFS does not require storage provisioning and comes as a pay-per-use service that can be scaled as per your requirements. To get a deeper understanding of what is EFS in AWS, you can consider pursuing an AWS training course.
Storage Types in AWS EFS
Amazon EFS file networks make use of standard storage classes. They carry your data and information across various AWS Region Availability Zones. The systems can extend from gigabytes to petabytes without compromising their performance.
Based on the user requirements, EFS can provide you with two different types of storage. These types are:
- Standard Access
- Infrequent Access
The standard access storage is designed for the type of data that has to be accessed frequently by the user. On the other hand, infrequent access data, as the name suggests, is designed for long-term data. Such type of data can be accessed occasionally at comparatively lower expenses.
Features of Amazon EFS
Amazon EFS provides its users with several features. Some of them are:
- Entirely Managed: Amazon EFS is a completely handled solution. It offers Linux workloads along with NFS-shared file-based storage. The platform makes it quite simple for you to create as well as operate file systems on your device. The users are not responsible to manage file retention, updating hardware, configuring software, or performing any backups.
- Highly Accessible and Long-lasting: Amazon EFS is designed in such a way that it is highly durable and accessible for its users. AWS EFS maintains every file system entity redundantly. The file systems are administered through several availability zones and use standard storage facilities.
- Scalable and Elastic: Amazon EFS can adjust storage levels for your file networks. These levels depend on the number of documents present in your system. These levels further extend and contract as you add or remove files from the system. The overall performance of the platform increases with an increase in the storage capacity of up to petabytes.
Advantages of Using AWS EFS
The following are the number of benefits of using EFS in AWS.
- Store files in AWS EFS, provide server-free, and completely elastic storage to its users.
- Amazon EFS is specifically designed to scale up to a petabyte, depending on consumer demands. EFS expands and contracts dynamically when you add or remove files from the system.
- Amazon EFS allows you to effortlessly manage multiple file systems with its simple web-based interface.
- Amazon EFS minimizes your burden to install, repair, or sustain large files in your system. It can handle all your file storage assets.
- Amazon EFS is specifically developed with the idea to be extremely scalable, highly responsive, and long-lasting.
- Amazon EFS mimics the conventional file hierarchy structure and is therefore comparatively simple to learn and use.
Various Modes in AWS Elastic File Systems
The Amazon Elastic File Systems provide two modes of operation in their service. These modes are:
- Performance Mode
- Throughput Mode
The Performance mode and Throughput mode are further divided into multiple subcategories. Let us learn about each of these modes and levels in detail.
Performance Modes
Amazon EFS provides two performance levels. These are:
- General-purpose Mode
- Max I/O Mode
- General Purpose Mode: The general-purpose mode in the EFS offers the smallest latency per operation. However, it can tolerate a maximum of 35,000 IOPS. It is important to know that the file systems that implement EFS One Zone storage categories always make use of the general-purpose performance level.
On the other hand, for EFS standard storage, one can choose between the general-purpose setting and the Max I/O mode.
- Max I/O Mode: The Max I/O level in the performance mode can support more than 5000,000 IOPS. However, it offers a reduced latency per operation as compared to the general purpose mode.
Throughput Modes
AWS EFS offers two levels of throughput modes. These levels are:
- Bursting Throughput
- Provisioned Throughput
- Bursting Throughput: Bursting Throughput is the standard throughput mode in EFS. It is considered to be an ideal choice for traditional applications that particularly feature burst throughput trends. When the throughput in the system is low, this mode saves the bursting credits with the help of burst buckets. On the other hand, it spends the burst credits when the throughput is higher.
- Provisioned Throughput: Provisioned throughput is an excellent choice for users that are working with applications requiring a constant throughput. Under the provisioned throughput mode, users can specify a throughput level of their choice. The file system can provide this level independent of its present capacity or the status of bursting credit.
AWS EFS in Action
The Amazon Elastic File System can extend and compress dynamically each time users add or remove files from the system. This feature of EFS does not require any additional setup or management.
Refer to the below graphic to understand the detailed operation of an AWS Elastic File system.
Conclusion
Amazon EFS comes as a major storage offering from Amazon. After understanding the essential fundamentals of AWS EFS, you can easily optimize the performance and expense of your application. This blog explains what is AWS EFS, along with its essential features, operating modes, and workflow. Amazon EFS provides its users with scalable storage capacity to support AWS Elastic Compute Cloud workloads.
