Reinventing with AWS - Deep Dive into Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

Introduction

• The session aims to provide a deep dive into Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), a cloud-based file storage service.
• The presenters are Yui Jang, a senior product manager on the EFS team, and Alex Martino.
• The key takeaways are:
  1. EFS provides simple, cloud-based file storage that is easy to set up and use.
  2. EFS offers a rich feature set to help customers automatically achieve performance, cost savings, and security.
  3. A live demo will be presented to showcase the capabilities of EFS.

EFS Overview

• EFS is a fully elastic file storage service designed to provide the following:
  1. Configuration-free setup: Customers can set up a highly available, durable, and secure file system in just a few clicks.
  2. Fully elastic storage: EFS can scale to exabytes on demand without disrupting applications.
  3. Accessibility from anywhere: EFS is compatible with all AWS compute services and on-premises resources.
  4. Pay-as-you-go pricing model with built-in features to optimize costs.

Application Modernization

• EFS is well-suited for application modernization efforts, such as moving from on-premises to containerized or serverless architectures.
• EFS provides a simple and easy way to lift-and-shift applications, as it offers the same NFS interface as traditional file systems.
• EFS integrates with various AWS services, including Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Lambda, to enable stateful containerized applications and serverless functions.

Performance

• EFS offers three storage modes: Elastic Throughput (ET), Provisioned Throughput (PT), and Bursting Throughput (BT).
• Elastic Throughput mode is the default and recommended mode for most workloads, as it automatically scales performance to meet application requirements.
• EFS has continuously improved its performance, with recent enhancements increasing throughput, IOPS, and per-client throughput by over 10x.

Cost Optimization

• EFS offers three storage classes: EFS Standard, EFS Infrequent Access (IA), and EFS Archive.
• EFS Intelligent Tiering and EFS Lifecycle Management features automatically move data between the different storage classes based on access patterns, optimizing costs.
• EFS is 90% more cost-effective than running a customer-owned file system infrastructure.

Availability, Durability, and Data Protection

• EFS is designed for 99.99% availability and 11-9s data durability, with data redundantly stored across multiple Availability Zones.
• Customers can further protect their data using AWS Backup and the new EFS Replication feature, which enables cross-region and cross-account data replication.

Security

• EFS provides security features like EFS Access Points and integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control application access.
• Customers should follow best practices, such as controlling network access using VPC Security Groups and enabling encryption in transit and at rest.

Use Cases and Customer Examples

• Customers use EFS for a wide range of workloads, from complex SaaS applications to simple file distribution for serverless functions.
• The demo showcases a common analytics pattern, where a single publisher writes data to EFS, and a large number of consumers (EC2 instances and Lambda functions) concurrently read the data.
• Customer examples, such as QT and SAP, demonstrate how EFS's cost optimization features have helped them reduce storage costs by over 30% and 50%, respectively.

Conclusion

• EFS provides a simple, elastic, and cost-effective file storage service that can help customers focus on solving business problems rather than managing infrastructure.
• The presenters encourage attendees to try EFS and take advantage of its features to modernize their applications and optimize costs.