KV Cloud Solutions

Easier setup than expected, performed well providing NFS access to my EC2 apps, backed by S3

• December 09, 2015
• Review verified by AWS Marketplace

Why I tried this: I was looking to run my own mini-grid app on about 10 Linux instances in AWS EC2. I tried s3fs and also tried to make my app talk directly to s3, but came to the realization that I needed file services for the way my app I/O interacted with my 10TB+ dataset of large files.

Pros: Really easy setup (6-8 minutes) once the environment is right. The ability to use cheap storage (S3) for my multi-TB dataset instead of pricey EBS. The NFS server is automatic set up and is ready for clients to mount as soon as setup completes. There are historical filesystem snapshots of my data browsable by the clients. Performance was pretty decent, at least 100MB/sec for both reads and writes, and I saw peaks of 200-300MB/sec when reading some of my busiest files.

Cons: The environment setup has a bunch of pre-reqs, but the vendor provides videos to help through this. You have to get the VPC pub/priv subnet config + NAT + IAM role + S3 endpoint service all set up before you can kick off the actual appliance setup. The Dashboard gauges don't seem to be updated in real-time despite the values (storage capacity, throughput, ops/sec) being very useful. I did find the historical charts useful, but not sure about the roll-up numbers on the right.

I'm not running this thing 24/7, but only when my workload needs to be spun-up. This helps reduce EC2/EBS costs, while maintaining the integrity of my data in S3 at a lower cost, and still allowing my app to use off-the-shelf NFS connectivity to the storage.

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