What’s New with AWS File Storage?

When we consider storing data in the AWS Cloud, we have 3 options, namely: Object Storage, File Storage and Block Storage each with their own advantages.

Object Storage is perfect for its ability to scale massively and store object metadata with high durability while offering easy access from the internet.

File Storage is perfect to share files that require a file system with associated access permissions. This type of storage is often presented on premises as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Server. File storage use cases include content repositories, development environments, machine learning, data science, media stores, and user home directories.

Block Storage is perfect as dedicated low latency (local) storage for (virtual) hosts. Block Storage is analogous to direct-attached storage (DAS) or a Storage Area Network (SAN) storage. Block-based cloud storage solutions like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) are provisioned with each virtual server and offer the ultra-low latency required for high performance workloads.

Today I’d like to look at some of the new(er) features and solutions of Elastic File Storage that many AWS users are un-aware of:

Amazon EFS is a fully managed service providing NFS shared file system storage for Linux workloads. EFS makes it simple to create and configure file systems. You don't have to worry about managing file servers or storage, updating hardware, configuring software, or performing backups. In seconds, you can create a fully managed file system by using the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or an AWS SDK. EFS is designed to be highly available and is designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability.

Did you know that you can directly connect your on-premises Datacentre to AWS EFS, and you can encrypt all data stored in an EFS store (encryption at rest)? More recently, AWS announced the availability of provisioned throughput for your performance requirements and 4 different classes of EFS storage which can help lower your storage costs (EFS Standard, EFS Standard-IA, EFS One Zone and EFS One Zone-IA) all options support intelligent-tiering and lifecycle storage management policies.

Most recently, AWS have added replication to EFS. You can now use replication to automatically maintain copies of your EFS file systems for business continuity or to help you to meet compliance requirements as part of your disaster recovery strategy. All replication traffic stays on the AWS global backbone, and most changes are replicated within a minute, with an overall Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes for most file systems. Replication does not consume any burst credits and it does not count against the provisioned throughput of the file system.

While we’re on the topic of Elastic Storage - Did you also know that AWS also has different File Storage solutions for other uses?

Amazon EFS provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system that lets you share file data without provisioning or managing storage for a broad range of Linux-based applications.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides a fully managed highly reliable, scalable, performant, fully managed shared storage for Linux, Windows, and MacOS workloads.

Amazon FSx for OpenZFS provides a fully managed shared file storage built on the OpenZFS file system, powered by the AWS Graviton family of processors, and accessible via the NFS protocol.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides a fully managed native Windows file system with Windows features and performance optimized for Windows-based business applications.

Amazon FSx for Lustre is for compute-intensive applications such as high-performance computing. Amazon FSx for Lustre allows you to easily process data with a file system that’s optimized for the performance and cost of short-lived, compute-intensive processing jobs, with input and output stored on Amazon S3.

All of this information is typically shared during our AWS training courses (typically Architecting on AWS and Systems Operations on AWS). Stay current with AWS features by attending one of our highly rated training courses or contact us for more information on how to implement a storage solution for your cloud services.

References:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/storage-classes.html

https://aws.amazon.com/efs/features/