Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) has launched Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), a fully managed service that enables users to easily set up and scale file storage in the AWS Cloud.
Utilizing the AWS Management Console, customers can use Amazon EFS to create file systems that are accessible to multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances via the Network File System (NFS) protocol. The system can automatically scale without needing to provision storage or throughput, allowing file systems to grow to petabyte scale.
Amazon EFS can support a range of file workloads from big data analytics, media processing, and genomics analysis, to latency-sensitive use cases such as content management, home directory storage, and web serving. According to AWS, the system is highly available and durable, redundantly storing each file system object across multiple Availability Zones. Every file system can burst to at least 100 MB per second, and file systems greater than 1 TB in size can burst to higher throughput as file system capacity grows.
“As customers continue to move more and more of their IT infrastructure to AWS, they’ve asked for a shared file storage service with the elasticity, simplicity, scalability, and on-demand pricing they enjoy with our existing object (Amazon S3), block (Amazon EBS), and archive (Amazon Glacier) storage services,” says Peter DeSantis, vice president, compute services, AWS. “Initially, our customers most passionately asking for a file system were trying to solve for throughput-heavy use cases like data analytics applications, large-scale processing workloads, and many forms of content and web serving. Customers were excited about Amazon EFS’s performance for those workloads, and pretty soon they were asking if we could expand Amazon EFS to work excellently for more latency-sensitive and metadata-heavy workloads like highly dynamic web applications. That’s what we’ve been working on for the last few months and we’re excited to release it to customers today.”
Customers can launch Amazon EFS using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDKs. There is no minimum fee or setup cost, and Amazon EFS users pay only for the storage they use. For more information about Amazon EFS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/efs.
