Chapter 7.5 - EFS Overview

Question 1

What is EFS?

Answer 1

Amazon Elastic File System - Shared Storage

A managed NFS (network file system) that can be mounted on many EC2 instances.

Uses NFSv4 protocol

Question 2

What are the use cases for EFS?

Answer 2

Content Management

• Easily share content between EC2 instances
• Wordpress blogs, Joomla! websites

Web Servers
- Have just a single folder structure for your website.

Question 3

What are the two fundamental performance characteristics options for EFS?

Answer 3

General Purpose
- Web servers, CMS, etc.

Max I/O
- Big data, media processing, etc.

Question 4

What are the Pros and Cons of EFS?

Answer 4

Pros

• Highly available and scalable
• File system scales automatically up to petabytes; no capacity planning required
• Only pay for the storage you use (no provisioning required)
• Can support thousands of concurrent NFS connections
• Data is stored across multiple AZs within a region
• Read-after-write consistency

Cons

• Expensive
• Only compatible with Linux-based AMI (Windows not supported at this time)