Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | On-premises Access Flashcards
Does encryption impact Amazon EFS performance?
On-premises Access
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
Encrypting your data has a minimal effect on I/O latency and throughput.
How do I access an EFS file system from servers in my on-premises datacenter?
On-premises Access
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
To access EFS file systems from on-premises, you must have an AWS Direct Connect connection between your on-premises datacenter and your Amazon VPC. AWS Direct Connect establishes a private network connection between your on-premises datacenter and AWS. If you do not already have an AWS Direct Connect connection, you can create one by following the instructions in the AWS Direct Connect user guide.
You mount an EFS file system on your on-premises Linux server using the standard Linux mount command for mounting a file system via the NFSv4.1 protocol.
For more information about accessing EFS file systems from on-premises servers via AWS Direct Connect, please see the documentation.
What can I do by enabling access to my EFS file systems from my on-premises servers?
On-premises Access
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
You can mount your Amazon EFS file systems on your on-premises servers, and move file data to and from Amazon EFS using standard Linux tools and scripts. The ability to move file data to and from Amazon EFS file systems enables three use cases.
First, you can migrate data from on-premises datacenters to permanently reside in Amazon EFS file systems.
Second, you can support cloud bursting workloads to offload your application processing to the cloud. You can move data from your on-premises servers into your EFS file systems, analyze it on a cluster of EC2 instances in your Amazon VPC, and store the results permanently in your EFS file systems or move the results back to your on-premises servers.
Third, you can periodically copy your on-premises file data to EFS to support backup and disaster recovery scenarios.
Can I use an AWS VPN to access an EFS file system from on-premises?
On-premises Access
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
No, Amazon EFS does not support access over AWS VPN.
Can I access my Amazon EFS file system concurrently from my on-premises datacenter servers as well as Amazon EC2 instances?
On-premises Access
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
Yes, you can access your Amazon EFS file system concurrently from servers in your on-premises datacenter as well as Amazon EC2 instances in your Amazon VPC. Amazon EFS provides the same file system access semantics, such as strong data consistency and file locking, across all EC2 instances and on-premises servers accessing a file system.
What is the recommended best practice when moving file data to and from on-premises servers via AWS Direct Connect?
On-premises Access
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
Because of the propagation delay tied to data traveling over long distances, the network latency of a Direct Connect connection between your on-premises datacenter and your Amazon VPC can be tens of milliseconds. If your file operations are serialized, the latency of the Direct Connect connection directly impacts your read and write throughput; in essence, the volume of data you can read or write during a period of time is bounded by the amount of time it takes for each read and write operation to complete. To maximize your throughput, parallelize your file operations so that multiple reads and writes are processed by EFS concurrently. Standard tools like GNU parallel enable you to parallelize the copying of file data. For more information, see the online documentation.
