AWS provides three main types of storage: Object Storage (S3), Block Storage (EBS), and File Storage (EFS).
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system. It is designed to be shared across thousands of Amazon EC2 instances simultaneously.
EBS vs EFS
Understanding when to use EFS requires understanding its alternative, EBS (Elastic Block Store).
EBS (Elastic Block Store)
EBS is like a physical hard drive plugged into your computer.
An EBS volume can only be attached to one EC2 instance at a time.
If you have 5 web servers, they cannot share a single EBS volume to read the same configuration files.
EFS (Elastic File System)
EFS is like a network drive (NFS - Network File System).
It can be attached to thousands of EC2 instances simultaneously.
If one web server writes a file to the EFS drive, all other 4,999 servers can instantly read that file.
Key Features
Fully Elastic: You never have to provision capacity for EFS. It grows and shrinks automatically as you add or remove files. You only pay for the gigabytes you actually use.
Highly Available: By default, EFS stores your data redundantly across multiple Availability Zones. If an entire AWS data center goes offline, your data remains accessible.
EKS Integration: EFS is heavily used in Kubernetes. By using the EFS CSI Driver, multiple Pods running on entirely different physical worker nodes can mount the exact same persistent storage volume simultaneously (Access Mode: ReadWriteMany).
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