Amazon EFS Introduction
Learn how Amazon EFS provides scalable, shared file storage for EC2 and Lambda, including key setup options, cost optimization, and integration best practices.
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Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a fully managed, scalable, elastic file storage service that allows multiple Amazon EC2 instances to access a common dataset in parallel, using the standard Network File System (NFS) protocol. What sets EFS apart is that it scales automatically as files are added or removed, so there’s no need to provision storage in advance.
Think of EFS as a shared network drive, but hosted in the AWS Cloud, with built-in redundancy and high availability. Whether we’re hosting a web application across multiple EC2 instances or sharing configuration files between compute resources, EFS provides a central location for file storage that behaves like a traditional file system.
Unlike Amazon S3, which stores objects, EFS is a file system in the traditional sense. Files can be structured in directories, and access is POSIX-compliant, meaning standard Linux file permissions and operations apply.
EFS supports both burstable and provisioned throughput modes, and we only pay for what we use. This makes it a cost-effective and operationally simple solution for workloads that need shared file access without managing hardware or file server software.
Understanding EFS file server types
While Amazon EFS is a fully managed NFS-based file system, we have a couple of important decisions to make when we create a file system, especially about its durability model and cost profile. These decisions relate to what AWS calls file server types ...