Amazon Adds Replication to EFS

Michael Otey

Feb 4, 2022

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) allows EC2 instances, AWS Lambda functions and containers to share access to a fully-managed, high performance and highly available file system. Amazon EFS delivers low-latency performance for a wide variety of workloads and can scale to thousands of concurrent clients or connections. EFS can scale automatically and you only pay for the storage that you use. It also automatically grows and shrinks as you add and remove files with no need for management or provisioning.

For more information on AWS, check out What is AWS (Amazon Web Services)? – The Ultimate Guide on Petri.

Amazon EFS was first available in 2016 and since that time Amazon has added many new features and capabilities. Some of the main enhancements to EFS include the addition of on-premises access via Direct Connect in 2016, the encryption of data-at-rest in 2017. Provisioned throughput and encryption of data in-transit were added in 2018. In 2019 Amazon added an infrequent access storage class. IAM authorization & access points were added in 2020 and lower-cost one zone storage classes were added in 2021.

Automatically maintain copies of your EFS file systems for business continuity and disaster recovery

EFS replication was added in January 2022. You can use replication to automatically maintain copies of your EFS file systems for business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR). It can also be used to help you to meet compliance requirements. EFS replication can be used either within a single AWS region or between two AWS regions in the same AWS partition. If you intend to use EFS replication for BC or DR then you will want to set it up for two regions. While AWS is typically very reliable Amazon did experience outages in the US-EAST region near the end of 2021. EFS replication can be setup and configured using the Amazon EFS Console.

You can learn more about Amazon EFS at Amazon Elastic File System. Plus, if you want to try it out for yourself you can get 5 GB of standard storage for 12 months with the AWS Free Tier. You can also check out how to set up an EFS file system on Petri.

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