Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), which has been maturing its Amazon S3 storage services and Amazon Elastic Block Store storage service, has moved to file storage. Yesterday, Amazon Elastic File System was announced as being ready for production.
According to the company, EFS allows customers to access a fully managed filesystem via the Network File System protocol. This is even for multiple EC2 instances. AWS explains that Amazon EFS provides a standard interface and file system access semantics for mounting Amazon EC2 instances. This allows you to seamlessly integrate Amazon EFS into your existing applications and tools. Amazon EFS can be accessed by multiple Amazon EC2 instances at once, allowing Amazon EFS data to be shared with other Amazon EC2 instances.
Yesterday, Amazon EFS was announced that it is capable of supporting a wide range of file workloads, including Big Data analytics, media processing and genomics analysis. It also supports latency-sensitive use cases like content management, home directory storage, Web serving, and other latency-sensitive uses such as content management, Web serving, according to a statement. Amazon EFS is highly reliable and durable. It redundantly stores each file system object across multiple availability zones.
AWS stated that its new file storage service helps businesses move to AWS cloud with critical workloads dependent on Network Attached Storage (NAS). This solution is problematic for file storage as file growth is unpredictable and requires long procurement times. It also requires heavy monitoring and administrative tasks to patch and manage. The company claimed that EFS shared file systems are easy to use, scalable, and reliable.
Jeff Barr, spokesperson for AWS, provided additional information in a blog post about the use cases for the new service.
Barr stated that “We are launching today” after a lengthy preview period that provided us with insights into a wide range of customer use case scenarios. Barr said that EFS was a great fit for large-scale, high-throughput processing workloads. It also supports many forms of content and Web-serving. We received lots of positive feedback during the preview about EFS’s performance for these workloads. There were also requests to provide equal support for workloads that are sensitive or make heavy use of filesystem metadata.
“We have been listening to your feedback and today’s launch was designed to cover a wide range of uses. Based on what I’ve heard so far, EFS is very popular with customers and they plan to use it immediately.
AWS stated that there is no setup fee or minimum fee for the service. Customers pay only for the storage they use.
