Storage - What is the Amazon Elastic File System?

Question 1

What is Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)?

Answer 1

• Object storage solution
• Stores files as single objects
• Best for storing large files, static websites, and backup archives

Question 2

What is Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)?

Answer 2

• Block-level storage
• Stores files in small chunks of blocks
• Optimized for low latency access and fast read/write operations
• Provides persistent block storage volumes for EC2 instances

Question 3

What is Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)?

Answer 3

• File-level storage
• Optimized for low latency access
• Supports access by multiple EC2 instances at once
• Provides a file manager interface and standard file system semantics

Question 4

How is EFS accessed by users?

Answer 4

• Users browse network resources that connect to EFS
• Similar to accessing files on traditional file servers or NAS systems
• EC2 instances can be configured to access EFS using mount points

Question 5

What are the key features of Amazon EFS?

Answer 5

• Fully managed, highly available, and durable service
• Can scale to petabytes in size
• Provides low latency access and high throughput
• Supports tens, hundreds, or thousands of concurrent EC2 instances
• Replicated across availability zones in a single region
• Supports NFS versions 4.1 and 4.0 and standard file system semantics

Question 6

What are the advantages of using EFS?

Answer 6

• No need to provision file servers or perform maintenance
• Supports standard operating system APIs
• Provides strong consistency and file locking
• Enables parallel access to data for applications scaling across multiple instances
• Offers high availability for application storage layer in multi-AZ deployments

Question 7

Is EFS available in all AWS regions?

Answer 7

• No, EFS is not currently available in all regions (as of the time of writing)