Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Scale and Performance Flashcards
How do I access my file system from outside my VPC?
Scale and Performance
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
Amazon EC2 instances within your VPC can access your file system directly, and Amazon EC2 Classic instances outside your VPC can mount a file system via ClassicLink. On-premises servers can mount your file systems via an AWS Direct Connect connection to your VPC.
How much data can I store?
Scale and Performance
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
Amazon EFS file systems can store petabytes of data. Amazon EFS file systems are elastic, and automatically grow and shrink as you add and remove files. You do not provision file system size or specify a size up front and you pay only for the storage you use.
How many Amazon EC2 instances can connect to a file system?
Scale and Performance
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
Amazon EFS supports one to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances connecting to a file system concurrently.
How many file systems can I create?
Scale and Performance
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
By default, you can create up to 10 file systems per AWS account per region. You can request to increase your file system limit by visiting AWS Service Limits.
How does Amazon EFS performance compare to that of other storage solutions?
Scale and Performance
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
Amazon EFS file systems are distributed across an unconstrained number of storage servers, enabling file systems to grow elastically to petabyte-scale and allowing massively parallel access from Amazon EC2 instances to your data. Amazon EFS’s distributed design avoids the bottlenecks and constraints inherent to traditional file servers.
This distributed data storage design means that multi-threaded applications and applications that concurrently access data from multiple Amazon EC2 instances can drive substantial levels of aggregate throughput and IOPS. Big Data and analytics workloads, media processing workflows, content management and web serving are examples of these applications.
The table below compares high-level performance and storage characteristics for Amazon’s file and block cloud storage offerings.
Amazon EFS
Per-operation latency: Low, consistent
Throughput scale: Multiple GBs per second
Amazon EBS
PIOPS
Per-operation latency: Low, consistent
Throughput scale: Single GB per second
Amazon EFS’s distributed nature enables high levels of availability, durability, and scalability. This distributed architecture results in a small latency overhead for each file operation. Due to this per-operation latency, overall throughput generally increases as the average I/O size increases, since the overhead is amortized over a larger amount of data. Amazon EFS’s support for highly parallelized workloads (i.e. with consistent operations from multiple threads and multiple EC2 instances) enables high levels of aggregate throughput and IOPS.
What’s the difference between “General Purpose” and “Max I/O” performance modes? Which one should I choose?
Scale and Performance
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) | Storage
“General Purpose” performance mode is appropriate for most file systems, and is the mode selected by default when you create a file system. “Max I/O” performance mode is optimized for applications where tens, hundreds, or thousands of EC2 instances are accessing the file system — it scales to higher levels of aggregate throughput and operations per second with a tradeoff of slightly higher latencies for file operations. For more information, please see the documentation on File System Performance.
