AWS EFS & FSx

This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam, to view the whole series click here.

Elastic File Storage (EFS) Summary

• Fully managed, scalable file storage that supports Network File Storage version 4 (NFSv4) and can be mounted to your EC2 instance.

• Storage capacity is elastic and can scale to petabytes, growing and shrinking as you add/remove files.

• Highly durable and available as data is stored across multiple Availability Zones.

• Native to Unix & Linux, but not supported on Windows instances.

• Only pay for what you use

• Can migrate your on-premise file system to EFS, which can help lower your cost of ownership.

FSx Summary

• Fully managed, highly performant, native Microsoft Windows file system.

• Easily move Windows based applications that require storage to AWS

• Can choose between using a single availability Zone or using Multiple Availability Zones, depending on your needs.

• Data is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit.

• Can integrate with other AWS services e.g. S3, CloudWatch, KMS etc.

• FSx also supports AD users, access control lists, security policies and distributed files systems.

FSx for Lustre

• Fully managed, fast and scalable file system which has optimised compute for intensive workloads.

• Typically used for High Performance Computing (HPC) or machine learning workloads.

• FSx for Lustre offers sub-millisecond latencies and millions of IOPS.

• It can also can have up to hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput.

When to use what?

1. EFS → when you need scalable and resilient storage for linux instances.

2. FSx (Windows) → when you require centralised storage for windows based applications e.g. Sharepoint

3. FSx (Lustre) → when you need high speed or high capacity for HPC or ML workloads.