Scale & Capacity
- Supports thousands of concurrent NFS clients and petabyte-scale storage.
- Throughput up to 10 GB/s with automatic scaling.
Performance Modes (set at creation)
- General Purpose (default) – Low latency, best for web servers, CMS, and latency-sensitive apps.
- Max I/O – Higher latency but optimized for maximum throughput and parallelism; suitable for big data and media processing.
Throughput Modes
- Bursting – Baseline of 50 MiB/s per TiB of storage, with bursts up to 100 MiB/s.
- Provisioned – Fixed throughput regardless of storage size, e.g., 1 GiB/s for a 1 TiB file system.
- Elastic – Scales automatically with usage; up to 3 GiB/s reads and 1 GiB/s writes, ideal for unpredictable workloads.
Storage Classes (managed via lifecycle policies)
- Standard – Multi-AZ, high availability for frequently accessed data.
- Infrequent Access (EFS-IA) – Lower cost storage, higher retrieval cost.
- Archive – For rarely accessed files; ~50% cheaper than EFS-IA.
- One Zone – Stored in a single AZ, lower cost, suitable for dev/test; can be paired with IA as EFS One Zone-IA.
Cost Optimization
- Lifecycle policies can automatically transition data between storage tiers based on last access (e.g., after 60 days).
- Tiering can yield over 90% cost savings for infrequently accessed data.
Additional Notes:
Enabling burst throughput mode on an Amazon EFS file system using the General Purpose performance mode and the EFS Standard storage class is the most effective approach for workloads with sporadic spikes in throughput demand but low average usage. In burst throughput mode, which is enabled by default for EFS file systems smaller than 1 TiB, EFS accumulates and consumes throughput credits that allow the system to burst to higher levels of throughput as needed—without requiring manual intervention. This mode is ideal for unpredictable workloads like genomics analysis, where short periods of intense activity are followed by idle time. Importantly, using the EFS Standard storage class ensures high availability across multiple Availability Zones, aligning with best practices for fault-tolerant and latency-sensitive environments.