Centralized NFS storage
Remember EFS (AWS)
Full name: Amazon Elastic File System
Memory aid: Elastic Files are Shared as a System.
This EFS means an AWS service, not the Windows Encrypting File System.
Study area: Cloud & virtualization · Batch 9
Relevant study for: CompTIA Cloud+ · Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 · ISC2 CCSP · AWS Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 · Azure Administrator AZ-104 · Azure Solutions Architect AZ-305
Practice with exam flashcards →Cloud / Knowledge library
Amazon EFS
Provides elastic managed NFS file storage for AWS compute services
Why learn Amazon EFS?
Teams use Amazon EFS to adopt managed file storage without building the complete underlying platform themselves.
The problem it solves
Provides shared hierarchical filesystems over standard network file protocols
Where it came from
Amazon EFS is Amazon Web Services's offering for managed file storage. Its closest catalog counterparts are Azure Files and Google Cloud Filestore; they address the same broad need but are not feature-for-feature identical.
Build your understanding
Work through these exercises in order. Try the task before opening a reference.
- Explain the main responsibility of Amazon EFS.
- Choose a workload that fits Amazon EFS.
- Identify one operational tradeoff of Amazon EFS.
- Compare Amazon EFS with Azure Files.
- Compare Amazon EFS with Google Cloud Filestore.
Documentation and sources
- AWS cloud services catalog (aws.amazon.com)
Connect the ideas
Alternatives
Real World Example
Collaborative Media Rendering Workflow
A boutique animation studio requiring shared access to large asset libraries across multiple compute instances.
The business problem
The studio struggled with data silos where individual rendering instances maintained local copies of assets, leading to inconsistent versions and high storage overhead.
How this topic solves it
Amazon EFS provides a managed, elastic NFS file system that allows multiple compute instances to concurrently mount the same storage volume, ensuring a single source of truth for all rendering assets.
- Create an Amazon EFS file system within the VPC to serve as the centralized asset repository.
- Configure mount targets in each Availability Zone where rendering instances are deployed.
- Update the security group rules for the EFS mount targets to permit NFS traffic from the rendering instances.
- Mount the EFS file system on each compute instance using the standard Linux mount command with the NFS protocol.
This diagram illustrates how multiple compute nodes connect to a central EFS file system.
Network interface in AZ1
Network interface in AZ2
Rendering instance
Rendering instance
- EFS File System → provides access → Mount Target AZ1
- EFS File System → provides access → Mount Target AZ2
- Compute Node A → mounts via NFS → Mount Target AZ1
- Compute Node B → mounts via NFS → Mount Target AZ2
Expected business outcome
The studio achieves seamless collaboration as all rendering nodes access the same file system, eliminating the need for manual synchronization and reducing storage redundancy.
Limitations and checks
EFS performance is subject to throughput limits based on the file system size and burst credits; administrators can monitor this via CloudWatch metrics to ensure the workload does not exceed provisioned or burstable capacity.