AWS re:Invent 2025 - What's new with AWS File Storage (STG203)

AWS re:Invent 2025 - What's New with AWS File Storage

Overview of File Storage at AWS

• File storage is the fastest growing storage service at AWS, driven by a variety of use cases:
  • Enterprise applications like databases, file shares, and business-critical workloads
  • Backup and disaster recovery for on-premises data
  • Machine-generated data like stock tickers, genomics, and AI/ML training data
  • Data-intensive workloads that require high-speed, high-throughput shared storage

AWS File Storage Portfolio

AWS offers a rich portfolio of file storage services, each optimized for different types of workloads:

Amazon FSX for Windows File Server, FSX for Open ZFS, and FSX for NetApp ONTAP

• Provide "lift-and-shift" migration paths for customers using traditional on-premises NAS appliances
• Allow customers to easily migrate file-based workloads and applications to AWS without re-architecting

Amazon FSX for Lustre

• Optimized for high-performance computing, GPU-intensive workloads, and machine learning training
• Provides extremely high throughput and IOPS to keep CPUs and GPUs fully utilized

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

• Fully elastic, simple file storage service designed for cloud-native, containerized, and serverless workloads
• Offers simplicity and ease-of-use over more advanced data management features

Optimizing Price-Performance

Amazon EFS Enhancements

• Increased read throughput from 30 Gbps to 60 Gbps and write throughput from 3 Gbps to 5 Gbps
• 10x increase in IOPS, from 250,000 to 2.5 million for reads and 30,000 to 50,000 for writes
• Introduced "scale-out performance" to automatically scale EFS performance as file systems grow
• Increased per-client throughput up to 1.5 GB/s and expanded access points from 1,000 to 10,000 per file system

Amazon FSX Intelligent Tiering

• Launched intelligent tiering for FSX for Open ZFS and FSX for Lustre
• Provides fully elastic, cost-optimized storage with three tiers ranging from 2.3 cents/GB to less than 0.5 cents/GB
• Includes optional SSD-based read cache for low-latency access to hot data

Doing More with Data

S3 Access for FSX

• Allows customers to access FSX file data through the S3 API, enabling use of a wide range of S3-integrated services
• Enables easy creation of knowledge bases, data lakes, and other analytics use cases directly on FSX file data

AWS Transfer Family Integration

• Allows customers to use FSX file systems as the storage backend for secure, auditable file transfers using protocols like SFTP and FTPS

Improving Resilience

File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) for FSX for Windows

• Brings Windows Server's file management and protection capabilities to the cloud
• Enables quotas, file screening, and storage reporting on FSX for Windows file systems

Anti-Ransomware Protection (ARP) for FSX for ONTAP

• Automatically detects and responds to potential ransomware activity, creating locked snapshots to protect data

Snaplock for FSX for ONTAP

• Provides write-once-read-many (WORM) protection, with compliance and enterprise modes
• Now offered at no additional charge to simplify ransomware protection strategies

Simplifying Data Migration

Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS) with FSX for ONTAP

• Allows customers to easily migrate VMware workloads to AWS while preserving existing storage, networking, and management
• Provides enterprise-grade storage features like instant cloning, deduplication, and replication for VMware data

FSX for ONTAP Flex Cache

• Enables caching of on-premises ONTAP data in the cloud or vice versa, providing low-latency access for globally distributed teams
• Introduces write-back caching to improve write performance for distributed workloads

Key Takeaways

• AWS continues to invest heavily in enhancing its file storage portfolio to meet the evolving needs of customers
• Optimizations around price-performance, data integration, resilience, and migration simplicity are key focus areas
• Customers can leverage a wide range of file storage options, each tailored to specific workload requirements
• Innovations like intelligent tiering, S3 integration, and advanced data protection features are enabling new cloud-based use cases
• AWS is making it easier than ever for customers to migrate and modernize their file-based workloads and applications