Amazon EFS now Supports Access Across Accounts and VPCs

Posted on: Nov 28, 2018

You can now connect to an Amazon EFS file system from EC2 instances in a different AWS account or Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Amazon EFS provides a simple, scalable, elastic file system for Linux-based workloads for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. When you use a VPC peering connection or VPC Transit Gateway to connect VPCs, EC2 instances in one VPC can access EFS file systems in another VPC, even if the VPCs belong to different accounts. You can also now place EC2 instances owned by one account in the same VPC as an EFS file system owned by a different account using shared VPCs. This allows applications in different accounts to share a central file system, eliminating the cost and complexity of copying data between VPCs. 

Access to Amazon EFS across accounts and VPCs is available in regions where Amazon EFS, VPC peering, VPC Transit Gateway, and shared VPCs are available. See the AWS Region Table for complete regional availability information. You will be billed only for network connectivity, such as any VPC Transit Gateways or VPC peering connections that you create, as well as associated data transfer fees. Intra-region VPC peering is only possible when using certain instance types. To learn more about how to access your Amazon EFS file systems, please consult the Amazon EFS documentation.