EFS Performance Overview
Amazon EFS file systems are distributed across an unconstrained number of storage servers. This distributed data storage design enables file systems to grow elastically to petabyte scale and enables massively parallel access from Amazon EC2 instances to your data. The distributed design of Amazon EFS avoids the bottlenecks and constraints inherent to traditional file servers.
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| Performance Comparison, Amazon EFS and Amazon EBS | ||
|---|---|---|
| Amazon EFS | Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS | |
| Per-operation latency | Low, consistent latency. | Lowest, consistent latency. |
| Throughput scale | 10+ GB per second. | Up to 2 GB per second. |
| Storage Characteristics Comparison, Amazon EFS and Amazon EBS | ||
|---|---|---|
| Amazon EFS | Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS | |
| Availability and durability | Data is stored redundantly across multiple AZs. | Data is stored redundantly in a single AZ. |
| Access | Up to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, from multiple AZs, can connect concurrently to a file system. | A single Amazon EC2 instance in a single AZ can connect to a file system. |
| Use cases | Big data and analytics, media processing workflows, content management, web serving, and home directories. | Boot volumes, transactional and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, and ETL. |
Amazon EFS Use Cases
- Big Data and Analytics
- Media Processing Workflows
- Content Management and Web Serving
- Home Directories
Performance Modes
General Purpose Performance Mode
We recommend the General Purpose performance mode for the majority of your Amazon EFS file systems. General Purpose is ideal for latency-sensitive use cases, like web serving environments, content management systems, home directories, and general file serving. If you don’t choose a performance mode when you create your file system, Amazon EFS selects the General Purpose mode for you by default.
Max I/O Performance Mode
File systems in the Max I/O mode can scale to higher levels of aggregate throughput and operations per second. This scaling is done with a tradeoff of slightly higher latencies for file metadata operations. Highly parallelized applications and workloads, such as big data analysis, media processing, and genomics analysis, can benefit from this mode.
Throughput Modes
There are two throughput modes to choose from for your file system, Bursting Throughput and Provisioned Throughput. With Bursting Throughput mode, throughput on Amazon EFS scales as the size of your file system in the standard storage class grows. For more information about EFS storage classes, see EFS Storage Classes. With Provisioned Throughput mode, you can instantly provision the throughput of your file system (in MiB/s) independent of the amount of data stored.Note
You can decrease your file system throughput in Provisioned Throughput mode as long as it’s been more than 24 hours since the last decrease. Additionally, you can change between Provisioned Throughput mode and the default Bursting Throughput mode as long as it’s been more than 24 hours since the last throughput mode change.