Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Reviews

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. 

I'm a consultant, and I architect solutions for customers by using Amazon EFS in other Amazon products. I am using EFS based on NFS version 4.

I have a customer who is using around 20 Linux servers hosting MySQL databases. Their storage is in Amazon EFS. So, around 20 Linux servers are connecting to Amazon EFS.

Before Amazon EFS, our customer was using EBS volumes in a unique EC2 instance to serve NFS servers. Now, these EC2 instances are not necessary. The productivity of the customer has improved by around 30% by using Amazon EFS instead of a unique EC2 NFS instance.

Its elasticity and flexible pricing are the most valuable. For Amazon EFS, you are charged based on the storage. It is also very fast and stable with a very simple and intuitive interface.

It could be better in connecting with Windows Server instances.

I have been working with Amazon EFS for around two years.

Its stability is wonderful. Our customers are very grateful because it has been working successfully in a very much acceptable way.

Its scalability is great. It is very fast. It is almost instantaneous. Our customers are small and medium business companies.

For this project, we did not need support. We didn't use professional or paid support. Amazon's documentation is very rich and helped us during this project.

Our clients didn't know any other solution like this. We, as IT consultant, offered the solution to the clients.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

It has flexible pricing. You are charged based on your storage.

It a great scalable and stable solution, but just use Unix or Linux servers on-premises or in the Amazon cloud. I won't recommend using a Network File System to connect to Windows Servers.

I would rate Amazon EFS a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for deploying large serverless functions. It helps run Lambda functions with large dependencies like Tensorflow.

The solution doesn't have any size limitations for packages. Also, loading modules from EFS is fast enough. EFS can be easily mounted to an EC2 machine and written to.

The solution's deployment process could be faster while installing Python packages. If the Python environment is also maintained in the EFS, then installing modules takes forever to complete. Thus, we had to maintain the package environment outside of EFS, like within the EC2 instance it is mounted to.

We have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is scalable. Although, sometimes, it fails to scale up in dynamic settings when traffic surges.

We tried to use AWS ECS as well. But we encountered difficulties working with ECS due to our technical limitations. EFS was easier for us.

The solution's initial setup is easy if you have prior experience. It takes only under ten minutes to complete.

The solution's price is mid-ranged.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it a nine out of ten. It is a good service and provides faster loading of packages.

The solution is quite stable. There were some bugs at a point but after we patched it, it was stable. 

The user activity needs to be more connected and not required to connect to a PC or a device. It would be good to have remote access to a client, like OneDrive that we can share with other.

We have been using this solution for almost five years. It is deployed on-premises.

It is a scalable solution. We have about 400 users using Amazon EFS. It took one person to deploy.

The initial setup was straightforward. It came out to the vendors and took a couple of months.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. I would have rated it ten if not for the upcycle.

We need our storage to expand based on demand but storage is a bit costly. So we start with a smaller amount and, as we grow, we use EFS on demand. It manages our costs.

We can predict our storage which comes over a period of time. So it is better that we start small and it automatically helps us grow. 

We are not that big of a cloud user. We just use it for the storage of our bytes. The most valuable aspect is the storage. 

It should be simplified. There are people who don't have cloud experience. It should be storage that we are able to just connect to. We help create direct connectors to the cloud storage so we can just connect them like any regular databases. We just connect them then store it.

I have been using Amazon EFS for around two years. 

We get some help from the local Amazon team so we don't have any problems with it. 

We haven't needed to contact customer support. 

We used an integrator for the deployment. 

Initially, the cost of storage seems to be small. But customer cost for the storage is really very high and this doesn't work for India. We do not have that kind of economy and we are basic market users. This is really challenging and they should bring it down tremendously. The monthly cost is so high.

Now that social media is so popular, people will definitely need a lot of storage and if it can be brought down, people will be a lot happier to invest. I would suggest offering two terabytes or five terabytes per year for 1,000 rupees. It's a price that's more doable. 

I would definitely recommend this solution. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. They should look into what Google and other providers are offering.