EFS and FSx File Storage

Amazon EFS provides NFS file systems that can be mounted simultaneously by thousands of EC2 instances across multiple AZs. EFS is elastic—grows and shrinks automatically with usage.

Performance modes: General Purpose (default) for most workloads—low latency per operation. Max I/O for highly parallelized applications (big data, media processing) with higher throughput but slightly higher latency.

Throughput modes: Bursting scales with storage size—baseline 100 MB/s, bursting to 3 GB/s for large volumes. Provisioned for steady-state high throughput regardless of size—specify MB/s directly. Elastic automatically scales throughput with storage, ideal for workloads with changing patterns.

EFS supports up to 7,000 throughput operations per second. Monitor performance with CloudWatch metrics: BurstCreditBalance, PercentIOLimit, MeteredIOBytes.

Access Points simplify managing EFS for applications—create named entry points with POSIX user/group IDs and root directories. Different applications can use different access points with different permissions on the same file system.

Mount Targets are network interfaces in each AZ—EC2 instances connect through the mount target in their AZ. Create mount targets in each AZ for high availability. Mount targets use NFSv4.1—configure security groups to allow NFS traffic (port 2049).

Encryption at rest uses AWS KMS to encrypt data stored on EFS. Enable during file system creation—cannot be disabled after. Encryption in transit uses TLS for NFS connections—configure mount options with tls transport.

EFS Standard stores data across multiple AZs for high availability. EFS One Zone stores in a single AZ at lower cost—suitable for dev/test or non-critical data that can tolerate AZ failure.

FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed SMB file shares—native Active Directory integration, DFS namespace support, and Windows ACLs. Ideal for lift-and-shift Windows workloads, .NET applications, and enterprise file shares.

FSx for Lustre is high-performance parallel file system for compute-intensive workloads—machine learning training, HPC, video rendering. Integrates with S3 as a data lake cache. Scales to hundreds of GB/s throughput and millions of IOPS.

FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides enterprise storage features—snapshots, cloning, replication, data tiering. Supports NFS, SMB, and iSCSI protocols. Good for databases, VMware migration, and applications needing enterprise storage features.

FSx for OpenZFS offers ZFS-compatible file systems with snapshots, compression, and data deduplication. Cost-effective for existing ZFS workloads moving to the cloud.

Web serving and content management: EFS provides shared storage for web servers across multiple AZs—CMS files, WordPress content, media assets. Mount EFS on all web servers for consistent content.

Container storage: ECS and EKS use EFS for persistent container storage—shared configuration, logs, and application data. EFS CSI driver integrates with Kubernetes.

Development tools: Shared source code repositories, build artifacts, and IDE workspaces. Multiple developers access the same file system through different instances.

Best practices: Use access points for application isolation. Enable lifecycle policies to transition infrequently accessed files to EFS IA (60% cheaper). Monitor with StorageBytes and StorageBytesStandard metrics. Use VPC endpoints for private access without internet gateway.

Cost optimization: EFS IA automatically stores infrequently accessed files at lower cost. Configure lifecycle policies to move files after 30-90 days of inaccessibility.