Amazon EFS Infrequent Access

Maximizing operational efficiency and reducing total cost of ownership are common drivers for moving business applications to the cloud.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. Amazon EFS Standard-Infrequent Access (EFS Standard-IA) and Amazon EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access (EFS One Zone-IA) are storage classes that provide price/performance that is cost-optimized for files not accessed every day, with storage prices up to 92% lower compared to Amazon EFS Standard (EFS Standard) and Amazon EFS One Zone (EFS One Zone) storage classes respectively. The EFS Standard-IA storage class costs only $0.025/GB-month¹, and the EFS One Zone-IA storage class costs only $0.0133/GB-month².

Using the industry accepted estimate that 20% of data is actively used and 80% is infrequently accessed, you can store your files on Amazon EFS at an effective price of $0.043/GB-month (20% $0.16/GB-month¹ for files stored on EFS One Zone + 80% $0.0133/GB-month¹ for files stored on EFS One Zone-IA = $0.043/GB-month)¹, or an effective price of $0.08/GB-month (20% $0.30/GB-month² for files stored on EFS Standard + 80% $0.025/GB-month² for files stored on to EFS Standard-IA = $0.08/GB-month)².

To get started with Infrequent Access (IA) storage classes, simply enable Amazon EFS Lifecycle Management for your file system by selecting a lifecycle policy that matches your needs. Amazon EFS will automatically and transparently move your files to the lower cost regional EFS Standard-IA storage class or EFS One Zone-IA storage class based on the last time they were accessed. Amazon EFS transparently serves files from both frequent access storage classes (such as EFS Standard and EFS One Zone) and Infrequent Access (IA) storage classes (such as EFS Standard-IA and EFS One Zone-IA) from a common file system namespace when the lifecycle policy to move files to these storage classes is set. You don't have to worry about which of your files are actively used and which are infrequently accessed. Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering offers an additional lifecycle policy that moves files back to EFS Standard or EFS One Zone automatically.

EFS Intelligent-Tiering delivers automatic cost savings for workloads with changing access patterns by placing your file data in the appropriate storage class, at the right time, based on file access patterns.

EFS Intelligent-Tiering uses Lifecycle Management to monitor your workload access patterns and automatically transition files that are not accessed for the duration of the lifecycle policy (e.g. 30 days) from either the EFS Standard or EFS One Zone storage class to their corresponding Infrequent Access (IA) storage class (EFS Standard-IA or EFS One Zone-IA). If access patterns change and that data is read from or written to again, Lifecycle Management automatically moves the files back to EFS Standard or EFS One Zone, eliminating the risk of unbounded access charges.

To use EFS Intelligent-Tiering, simply set two lifecycle policies: one to automatically move files to EFS Standard-IA or EFS One Zone-IA and another policy to automatically move files back to EFS Standard or EFS One Zone if accessed.

What these use cases have in common is they have unknown or changing access patterns. A low activity website becomes active once again, older reports in your document management system are referenced, or your machine learning inference datasets are re-used. Your data may be accessed from infrequent access storage classes (such as EFS Standard-IA or EFS One Zone-IA). If this happens, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move files to the appropriate storage class, at the right time, based on file access patterns.