Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Overview

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is the #4 ranked solution in our list of top Public Cloud Storage Services. It is most often compared to Microsoft Azure File Storage: Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs Microsoft Azure File Storage

What is Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)?

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides simple, scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Amazon EFS is easy to use and offers a simple interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.

When mounted to Amazon EC2 instances, an Amazon EFS file system provides a standard file system interface and file system access semantics, allowing you to seamlessly integrate Amazon EFS with your existing applications and tools. Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system at the same time, allowing Amazon EFS to provide a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one Amazon EC2 instance.

It’s designed for high availability and durability, and provides performance for a broad spectrum of workloads and applications, including Big Data and analytics, media processing workflows, content management, web serving, and home directories.

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Buyer's Guide

Download the Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: December 2020

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Customers

Arcesium, Atlassian, Seeking Alpha, Zend

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Video

Pricing Advice

What users are saying about Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) pricing:

"It has flexible pricing. You are charged based on your storage."

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Reviews

Krishna Rao

Customer Engagement, Presales and GIS Solution Architect at ESRI INDIA

Mar 30, 2020

Download

Enables us to predict our storage needs over time and start small and grow as we need

What is our primary use case?

We need our storage to expand based on demand but storage is a bit costly. So we start with a smaller amount and, as we grow, we use EFS on demand. It manages our costs. We can predict our storage which comes over a period of time. So it is better that we start small and it automatically helps us grow.

Pros and Cons

"We are not that big of a cloud user. We just use it for the storage of our bytes. The most valuable aspect is the storage."

"It should be simplified. There are people who don't have cloud experience. It should be storage that we are able to just connect to."

What other advice do I have?

I would definitely recommend this solution. I would rate it an eight out of ten. They should look into what Google and other providers are offering.

See Entire Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Review (402 Words) »

Marcelo Lucas

Director of IT at Computer Consulting

Dec 16, 2020

Download

A fast, stable, and scalable solution with flexible pricing and good elasticity

What is our primary use case?

I'm a consultant, and I architect solutions for customers by using Amazon EFS in other Amazon products. I am using EFS based on NFS version 4. I have a customer who is using around 20 Linux servers hosting MySQL databases. Their storage is in Amazon EFS. So, around 20 Linux servers are connecting to Amazon EFS.

Pros and Cons

"Its elasticity and flexible pricing are the most valuable. For Amazon EFS, you are charged based on the storage. It is also very fast and stable with a very simple and intuitive interface."

"It could be better in connecting with Windows Server instances."

What other advice do I have?

It a great scalable and stable solution, but just use Unix or Linux servers on-premises or in the Amazon cloud. I won't recommend using a Network File System to connect to Windows Servers. I would rate Amazon EFS a nine out of ten.

See Entire Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Review (401 Words) »