Amazon Elastic File System – Shared File Storage for Amazon EC2

I’d like to give you a preview of a new AWS service that will make its debut later this year.

Let’s take a quick look at the AWS storage portfolio. We currently offer:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for object storage, presented as buckets of objects and accessible over the Internet using URLs or APIs.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for SAN-style block storage, presented as disk volumes that can be attached to one Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance at a time.
• Amazon Glacier for archival storage, in the form of vaults of objects, available for infrequent access via APIs over the Internet.

Today we are introducing Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), our newest storage service. It provides multiple EC2 instances with low-latency, shared access to a fully-managed file system via the popular NFSv4 protocol, and is designed to perform well for a wide variety of workloads, with the ability to scale to thousands of concurrent connections.

We expect to see EFS used for content repositories, development environments, web server farms, home directories, and Big Data applications, to name just a few. If you’ve got the files, we’ve got the storage!

The SSD-based file systems are highly available and highly durable (files, directories, and links are stored redundantly across multiple Availability Zones within an AWS region) and grow or shrink as needed (there’s no need to pre-provision capacity). You’ll be able to create them using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and a simple set of APIs, and start using them within seconds.

File systems can grow to petabyte scale, and throughput and IOPS scale accordingly. You’ll pay only for the storage that you use (billed monthly based on the average used during the month) at the rate of $0.30 per gigabyte per month.

EFS is designed to support the security requirements of large, complex organizations. You’ll be able to use IAM to grant access to the EFS APIs, along with VPC security groups to control network access to file systems. You’ll be able to use standard file and directory permissions (good old chown and chmod) to control access to the directories, files, and links stored on your file systems.

Coming Soon
We will be opening up EFS in preview form in the near future. Visit the Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) page, and sign up for the preview today, and we will let you know as soon as it is ready for you to use. I will have more information on using Amazon EFS to share with you at that time.

— Jeff;