Amazon Elastic File System
Yet again Amazon ended the AWS Summit in San Francisco in the best fashion setting various benchmarks for other Cloud Services providers. One of the services which was announced towards the end of the keynote was the Amazon Elastic File System.
Amazon EFS is a file storage service for Amazon EC2 instances. In my opinion this will actually reduce a lot of burden as configuring file systems is going to be really fast and easy. It will support thousands of concurrent EC2 client connections.
Now, as we all know Amazon has always been customer oriented , so with Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking is done automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.
Amazon EFS supports the Network File System version 4 ( NFSv4 ) protocol, so compatibility with all the latest applications being used today is very easy & highly optimizable. Along with this , you can grant access to multiple EC2 instances to access your file system which will lead to a common, fast & efficient storage.
Major Benefits of EFS are as follows:-
- Seamless Integration
- Scale Up and Down Seamlessly
- Fully Managed Service
- Share File Storage Across Instances ( Instances in different availablity zones can access common file system )
- Consistent, Scalable Performance
Everyone must now be thinking how secure it is. Well, it is highly secure as Amazon EFS allows you to tightly control access to your file systems. Only Amazon EC2 instances within the VPC you specify can directly access your Amazon EFS file systems.
Also, the service automatically adjusts network throughput and storage IOPS. ( in out per second )
Pricing for Amazon EFS is specified on Amazon’s Page as $0.30/GB-month which again is great.
According to Amazon the major use-cases of the service would be:-
- Content repositories
- Big Data
- Employee Home Directories ( Organization having large number of employees accessing common data source )
- Development environments
For more detailed insight on how this service works, Amazon is organizing a Webinar on 29th April, 2015. Also a Preview of the service will become available by the end of this summer.
