Amazon Elastic File System

Amazon EFS is a serverless, scalable, high-performance file system in the cloud.

EFS file systems can be accessed by Amazon EC2 Linux instances, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda functions via a file system interface such as NFS protocol.

Amazon EFS supports file system access semantics such as strong consistency and file locking.

EFS file systems can automatically scale in storage to handle petabytes of data. With Bursting mode, the throughput available to a file system scales as a file system grows. Provisioned Throughput mode allows you to provision a constant file system throughput independent of the amount of data stored.

EFS file systems can be concurrently accessed by thousands of compute services without sacrificing performance.

Common use cases for EFS file systems include big data and analytics workloads, media processing workflows, content management, web serving, and home directories.

Amazon EFS has four storage classes: Standard, Standard Infrequent Access, One Zone, and One Zone Infrequent Access

You can create lifecycle management rules to move your data from standard storage classes to infrequent access storage classes.

Every EFS file system object of Standard storage is redundantly stored across multiple AZs.

EFS offers the ability to encrypt data at rest and in transit. Data encrypted at rest using AWS KMS for encryption keys. Data encryption in transit uses TLS 1.2

To access EFS file systems from on-premises, you must have an AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN connection between your on-
premises datacenter and your Amazon VPC.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is a fully managed, scalable file storage that is accessible over SMB protocol.

Since it is built on Windows Server, it natively supports administrative features such as user quotas, end-user file restore, and Microsoft Active Directory integration.

FSx for WFS is accessible from Windows, Linux, and MacOS compute instances and devices. Thousands of compute instances and devices can access a file system concurrently.

FSx for WFS can connect your file system to Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, VMware Cloud on AWS, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Amazon AppStream 2.0 instances.

Every file system comes with a default Windows file share, named share.

Common use cases for FSx for WFS include CRM, ERP, custom or .NET applications, home directories, data analytics, media and entertainment workflows, software build environments, and Microsoft SQL Server.

You can access FSx file systems from your on-premises environment using an AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN connection between your on-premises datacenter and your Amazon VPC.

You can choose the storage type for your file system: SSD storage for latency-sensitive workloads or workloads requiring the highest levels of IOPS/throughput. HDD storage for throughput-focused workloads that arent latency-sensitive.

Every FSx for WFS le system has a throughput capacity that you congure when the le system is created and that you can change at any time.

Each Windows File Server file system can store up to 64 TB of data. You can only manually increase the storage capacity.

Your file system can be deployed in multiple AZs or a single AZ only. Multi-AZ file systems provide automatic failover.

FSx for Windows File Server always encrypts your file system data and your backups at-rest using keys you manage through AWS KMS. Data-in-transit encryption uses SMB Kerberos session keys.

Amazon FSx for Lustre

Amazon FSx for Lustre is a serverless file system that runs on Lustre an open-source, high-performance file system.

The Lustre file system is designed for applications that require fast storage. FSx for Lustre file systems can scale to hundreds of GB/s of throughput and millions of IOPS. FSx for Lustre also supports concurrent access to the same file or directory from thousands of compute instances.

Unlike EFS, storage capacity needs to be manually increased, and only every six hours can you do so.

Amazon FSx for Lustre also integrates with Amazon S3, which lets you process cloud data sets with the Lustre high-performance file system.

Common use cases for Lustre include machine learning, high-performance computing (HPC), video processing, financial modeling, genome sequencing, and electronic design automation (EDA).

FSx for Lustre can only be used by Linux-based instances. To access your file system, you first install the open-source Lustre client on that instance. Then you mount your file system using standard Linux commands. Lustre file systems can also be used with Amazon EKS and AWS Batch.

FSx for Lustre provides two deployment options:

Scratch file systems are for temporary storage and shorter-term processing of data. Data is not replicated and does not persist if a file server fails.

Persistent file systems are for longer-term storage and workloads. The file servers are highly available, and data is automatically replicated within the AZ that is associated with the file system.

You can choose the storage type for your file system: SSD storage for latency-sensitive workloads or workloads requiring the highest levels of IOPS/throughput. HDD storage for throughput-focused workloads that arent latency-sensitive.

FSx for Lustre always encrypts your file system data and your backups at-rest using keys you manage through AWS KMS. FSx encrypts data-in-transit when accessed from supported EC2 instances