We have some critical applications. It's a file system. All the Linux file systems, they use it, and they use it as part of high availability.
The first valuable thing is it is scalable. That means I can grow the storage. And the second thing is they have the same file system. I can attach it to multiple servers. That means that everything can access it. That's the requirement we have. The application needs to be connected to that file system, whether the application is running on any server. It runs on another server. It should have access to that. So that is the reason it is there.
The performance should improve. That's what we expect. So increase the performance and decrease the latency.
Elastic File System, we started using it; it's new. Previously, we used Lustre File System storage. That was not really working as expected.
We used Lustre File System. It went on to AWS solution, but it did not work, so we switched to this.
The deployment is definitely not an easy process. It takes some time to deploy. And, it's not one click.
We use the pipeline and all that also. It takes us a minimum of two hours.
The requirement was to have a file system and also a backup disaster recovery. That means that if I create a file system in one region, it has to be available in another region so that if something happens, then I can restart it. So that takes us more time. I have to deploy it in another region. It doesn't automatically create a copy in another region.
So, all the public cloud services start with low, but the minute you start using it, they charge a lot. So, one thing is that AWS maintains it. But on-prem file systems, they're easy.
If I compare the file systems, then each of them has its own limitations and also advantages. If you want that, the limitations are the throughput and latency. Throughput is how fast I get it. If I try to access it more and more, it might become slower.
The return on investment really depends on the workload you have. You start low, but it might be expensive if you're a larger organization where you're okay to spend money because you want to leave all the overhead of maintenance to AWS, then you're okay.
We just started, so we don't know if there will be a return on investment. For example, there was another solution from AWS, which is called Lustre. So we had a lot of challenges with it. That's also a file system, but this is a different file system. So we had challenges with it, so we are moving to EFS.
Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten.
