Save even more on scalable, cloud-native file storage with Amazon EFS

Last month, we shared some detail on how tens of thousands of customers are using the Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Infrequent Access storage class (EFS IA) to easily and cost-effectively store their files natively in a fully managed, highly available and durable, elastic cloud file system. We announced on the AWS News blog that we’ve made Amazon EFS even more compelling, reducing the storage price for EFS IA by 44%*, one of the largest percentage price reductions AWS has launched to date.

With Amazon EFS’s new pricing, using the industry-accepted 80/20 rule we discussed in last month’s post, you can now store petabytes of data in your cloud file systems at an effective price of just $0.08/GB-month*. For this price point, EFS customers can store and access their files at scale, take advantage of all the benefits that EFS offers, blending both performance and low cost, without having to worry about which parts of their data sets are actively used, and which are infrequently accessed.

*Pricing in the US East (N. Virginia) region. See the Amazon EFS Pricing page for prices in other regions.

Success stories with Amazon EFS

Many customers are already saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on their cloud file storage costs using EFS Infrequent Access. Getting started with EFS IA is super easy – simply enable Lifecycle Management for your file system with a few clicks in the EFS console. With Lifecycle Management enabled, EFS monitors your file access patterns and automatically moves infrequently accessed files to the lower-cost storage class according to the policy you choose. With EFS IA, you can now save up to 92% compared to EFS Standard. Here’s a sample of what our customers are saying:

“Switching to EFS IA was very easy and reduced operations costs significantly. We have some legacy applications, and EFS enabled us to quickly lift and shift them to the cloud without interruption of operations. With the roll out of EFS IA, we’ve saved as much as $10k per month on our cloud NFS costs.”
— Ian Cooke, Computational Scientist and CTO, Dagan

“Implementing EFS IA with Lifecycle Management was really easy. We enabled Lifecycle Management through a few clicks in the console, and EFS did the rest. Infrequently accessed files began migrating to lower priced storage transparently, per the selected policy, without any impact to our users or applications.”

— Justin Falk, Director of IT, OnePacs 

“Roughly 80% of our file data isn’t touched every day. Using EFS IA for the majority of our colder file-based workloads, and EFS Standard for our warmer files, we’re saving on our EFS bill per month while maintaining the price and performance required for our business-critical data. Moving existing files into EFS IA was simple, leveraging the EFS Lifecycle Management feature which allows our team to spend more time on delivering innovation and less time managing data in order to lower IT costs.”

— Wesley Horner, Director of IT, InsideView  

We heard from customers they wanted more control over how soon their files move to EFS IA, so in addition to our original 30 day policy, in July, we launched additional lifecycle policy options that move files into EFS IA after 14, 60, or 90 days since last access. We’ve seen strong adoption for EFS IA using all the available policies, and customers like the flexibility to match their file system’s behavior to their workload needs.

In particular, some customers prefer shorter lifecycle policies to more immediately realize cost savings, while others have longer-lived file lifecycles where data is accessed heavily (for say, one calendar quarter) before it is rarely accessed again.

We know we can deliver even more EFS capabilities to our customers, and we’re continuing to iterate and deliver based on your feedback. This week’s news further demonstrates that we’re always looking for ways to make it even easier for customers to use the cloud, while extending the lowest possible prices we can. We’re excited to hear from you about what else you’d like to see from us next.