Creating an EFS File System

Introduction

Creating an Amazon EFS file system is incredibly straightforward because there is no capacity or throughput planning required. You simply create the system, and AWS handles the elasticity automatically.

Creating EFS via the Console

1. Navigate to the EFS dashboard in the AWS Management Console.
2. Click Create file system.
3. Provide a Name for the file system.
4. Select the VPC where your EC2 instances reside.
5. Click Create.

That's it! AWS automatically creates Mount Targets in every Availability Zone within that VPC.

Mounting EFS to an EC2 Instance

To use the file system, you must "mount" it to your Linux EC2 instances. You will need the amazon-efs-utils package, which is pre-installed on the Amazon Linux 2 AMI, but must be installed manually on Ubuntu.

# On Ubuntu EC2 instance
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install amazon-efs-utils

Next, create a directory where the network drive will be attached:

sudo mkdir /mnt/efs

Finally, mount the file system using the File System ID (e.g., fs-12345678) provided in the AWS Console:

sudo mount -t efs -o tls fs-12345678:/ /mnt/efs

Now, any file you write into /mnt/efs is actually being stored in the Elastic File System. If you run the exact same mount command on 10 other EC2 instances, they will all instantly see the files you just wrote!

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