Elastic File System

Question 1

What is Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)?

Answer 1

An AWS-managed implementation of NFS which allows for the creation of a shared ‘file system’ that can be mounted/used/shared by multiple EC2 instances at the same time.

Question 2

With EFS, is data stored on the EC2 itself?

Answer 2

No - this is an AWS-managed implementation of NFS (Storage protocol) which allows for the creation of shared ‘file system’ that can be mounted/used/shared with multiple EC2 instances at the same time

You can store media/posts for the A4L Website outside of the individual EC2 instances; this means media isn’t lost when instances are added/removed.

Question 3

What is a Mount Target?

Answer 3

The network interface within the VPC that instances (on-premise or in a VPC) will connect to.

Mount targets have an IP address from the range of the given VPC that they are in.

Question 4

Can you connect on-premise workloads to an EFS instance? If so, how?

Answer 4

Yes - you can also connect on-prem workloads to EFS mount targets in a VPC via a Direct Connect (DX) or a VPN connection.

Question 5

Why is EFS considered a “self-healing” ARCH?

Answer 5

EC2’s are “throw away” compute resources i.e nothing is stored on them directly - they point to something like RDS or EFS (other services) to interact with any persistent data.

Question 6

What OS/type of instance does EFS support?

Answer 6

Linux only.

Question 7

What 2 storage classes (of the 6) that EFS supports?

Answer 7

Standard

Standard IA

Question 8

What 2 “Modes” does EFS support?

Answer 8

General Purpose (default)

Max I/O (used for tons of parallel processes like Big Data)

Question 9

What 2 Throughput Modes does EFS support?

Answer 9

Bursting - throughput scales with the size of the file system

Provisioned - allows you to provision throughput requirements independent from the size of the file system