Amazon Elastic File System introduces EFS Access Points

Posted on: Jan 13, 2020

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Access Points is a new EFS feature that simplifies providing applications access to shared data sets in an EFS file system. EFS Access Points work together with AWS IAM and enforce an operating system user and group, and a directory for every file system request made through the access point.  

EFS Access Points represent a new way to manage application access in NFS environments with increased scalability, security, and ease of use. Use cases that can benefit from EFS Access Points include container-based environments where developers build and deploy their own containers, data science applications that require access to production data, and sharing a specific directory in your file system with other AWS accounts. 

Using access points is easy. With a few clicks in the EFS console, you can create an access point for your file system with an identity and a directory customized for your application. You can also update your file system’s IAM policy to refer to access points, for example, to require a specific IAM identity for a given access point. To use an access point, download the updated EFS mount helper from Github and mount your file system with the ‘-o accesspoint=’ mount option.

EFS Access Points is available today in all regions where Amazon EFS is available, at no additional charge.

To learn more, please read the blog, the documentation, or log in to the Amazon EFS console to get started.