Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a scalable, elastic, cloud-native file system for Linux OS. It’s managed file storage for Amazon EC2.

Features

Amazon EFS is elastic, so it automatically grows and shrinks as storage demands go up and down.  It’s a fully managed service, which means you can create or configure Amazon EFS to create shared file systems quickly without provisioning, deploying, patching, or maintenance! Amazon EFS provides access through standard file system interfaces you already use, and it is designed for high availability and durability across multiple Availability Zones.

It can grow to petabytes in size, and provides low latencies and high throughputs.  You can access EFS using the AWS admin console, API, or command prompts. You can mount EFS to EC2 instances or on-premises servers using AWS VPN or AWS DirectConnect.

It can support thousands of concurrent Network File system version 4 (NFSv4) protocol connections at once, and no pre-provisioning is required.  As with many other AWS services, you only pay for what you use, when you use it.

EFS can be mounted onto multiple EC2 instances, where as EBS can only be mounted onto one!

Resources

• Amazon EFS (AWS)