Amazon ECS – Data Volumes with Amazon EFS

• ECS can mount Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) volumes directly into containers.

• Supported on EC2 and Fargate launch types.

• EFS is regional and multi-AZ, so tasks in different AZs can share the same files.

Benefits

• Persistent storage even if tasks stop or restart.

• Shared access across multiple tasks and services.

• With Fargate + EFS, storage is fully serverless—no EC2 or file server management.

Common Use Cases

• Web applications serving files uploaded by users.

• Machine learning jobs sharing training datasets.

• Microservices that need to read/write to the same storage.

Notes

• Amazon S3 cannot be mounted as a native file system in ECS.

• Use Access Points for fine-grained permissions per task or service.