Elastic File System (EFS)
- Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, fully managed elastic NFS (Network File System) that can be mounted on multiple EC2.
- It supports the Network File System version 4 (NFSv4.1 and NFSv4.0) protocol.
- Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system at the same time, providing a common data source for workloads and applications
- It is compatible with only Linux based EMI. For Windows you need to use FSx service
- The service is designed to be highly scalable, highly available, and highly durable.
- Amazon EFS file systems store data and metadata across multiple Availability Zones in an AWS Region.
- It also supports authentication, authorization, and encryption capabilities to help you meet your security and compliance requirements.
- You need to pay 3 times more than GP2 storage (3x GP2) – Pay per use.
- You can backup EFS-to-EFS You can also synchronize on-premise file server data to EFS.
- You need to attach a security group to EFS volume network drive in order to allow access over the network
Difference between EBS and EFS
- EBS volumes can be attached to only one instance at a time. EFS is used as a shared drive and can be accessible on multiple instances
- Migrating an EBS volume across AZ means first backing it up (snapshot), then recreating it in the other AZ.