AWS EFS & FSx
2 min readFeb 22, 2021
This is part of a blog series giving a high level overview of the different services examined on the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam, to view the whole series click here.
Elastic File Storage (EFS) Summary
- Fully managed, scalable file storage that supports Network File Storage version 4 (NFSv4) and can be mounted to your EC2 instance.
- Storage capacity is elastic and can scale to petabytes, growing and shrinking as you add/remove files.
- Highly durable and available as data is stored across multiple Availability Zones.
- Native to Unix & Linux, but not supported on Windows instances.
- Only pay for what you use
- Can migrate your on-premise file system to EFS, which can help lower your cost of ownership.
FSx Summary
- Fully managed, highly performant, native Microsoft Windows file system.
- Easily move Windows based applications that require storage to AWS
- Can choose between using a single availability Zone or using Multiple Availability Zones, depending on your needs.
- Data is automatically encrypted at rest and in transit.
- Can integrate with other AWS services e.g. S3, CloudWatch, KMS etc.
- FSx also supports AD users, access control lists, security policies and distributed files systems.
FSx for Lustre
- Fully managed, fast and scalable file system which has optimised compute for intensive workloads.
- Typically used for High Performance Computing (HPC) or machine learning workloads.
- FSx for Lustre offers sub-millisecond latencies and millions of IOPS.
- It can also can have up to hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput.
When to use what?
- EFS → when you need scalable and resilient storage for linux instances.
- FSx (Windows) → when you require centralised storage for windows based applications e.g. Sharepoint
- FSx (Lustre) → when you need high speed or high capacity for HPC or ML workloads.
