Day 48 — Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Simplified

Today I explored Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) — a fully managed, scalable file storage service used with AWS compute resources like EC2. It’s perfect when multiple instances need to access the same shared file system.

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📁 What is Amazon EFS?

Amazon EFS provides a shared file storage system that can be mounted across multiple EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones. It behaves like a traditional Linux file system — but in the cloud!

🔧 Key Features:

• Fully managed and scalable

• Supports NFS protocol

• Elastic: Automatically grows and shrinks as files are added or removed

• Can be accessed from multiple EC2 instances simultaneously

• Data is stored redundantly across AZs for durability

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🧰 Use Cases for EFS

• Shared file system for web servers

• Content management systems (CMS)

• Development environments

• Machine learning workloads

• Application-level backups

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🧩 EFS vs EBS vs S3

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🏗️ Setting Up EFS

1. Create a file system from AWS Console

2. Choose VPC and mount targets in Availability Zones

3. Configure security groups for NFS (port 2049)

4. Mount the EFS to EC2 instances using:

    sudo mount -t nfs4 -o nfsvers=4.1 fs-XXXX.efs.<region>.amazonaws.com:/ /mnt/efs
   

5. Start sharing files across EC2 instances!

🔐 Tip: Use security groups and IAM policies to control access.

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💲 EFS Storage Classes

• Standard: High durability and performance

• Infrequent Access (IA): For files accessed less often (cost-saving)

• Lifecycle Management: Move files automatically to IA after a set number of days

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🧠 What I Learned Today

• EFS is AWS’s solution for shared file systems in the cloud

• It’s great for multi-instance apps, CMS, and dev environments

• Easily scalable, durable, and secure — with minimal maintenance

  Up next: Amazon Auto Scaling