Reduce Amazon EFS usage cost using EFS One Zone

AWS has recently released Amazon EFS One Zone Storage class. This article will elaborate on its benefits and use cases.

Before diving into EFS One Zone, Lets understand — What is EFS ?

Amazon EFS ( Elastic File System ) is a file storage service that is used with AWS compute services (EC2, ECS, EKS, AWS Fargate, Lambda functions) and on-premise resources via filesystem interface. Using EFS multiple compute resources can access same file system concurrently. Some of the features of EFS are listed below.

1. EFS provides strong consistency and file locking.
2. Allows concurrent access to filesystem from number of compute resources.
3. It’s a Fully managed services by AWS.
4. Its Elastic: Scales on demand.
5. Pay for only for space used.
6. Its serverless i.e. Set and forget.

EFS offer 4 storage classes :

1. Amazon EFS Standard.
2. Amazon EFS Standard-Infrequent Access.
3. Amazon EFS One Zone.
4. Amazon EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access.

EFS Standard vs EFS One Zone

EFS Standard

EFS One Zone

Lets discuss about recently released EFS One Zone Storage Class

- Availability: Stores data in single AZ as compared to 3 AZ by EFS Standard. One Zone Offers three 9’s availability SLA and same eleven 9’s of durability.

- Lifecycle Management: EFS One zone offers default lifecycle management that infrequently accessed data is moved to EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access tier.

- Cost Reduction: Amazon EFS One Zone storage classes, reduces storage costs upto 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes. Using with EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access further reduces cost upto 92% ( considering 80/20 rule)

- Performance : Offers Lower latency because data are not replicated across multiple AZs.

- Deployment : CloudFormation or Manually.

- Backup : EFS file systems comes with integrated backup managed by AWS backup. By default it backup has 24 hour backup policy with 35 days retention. So, customer can restore in Any AZ in current region.

Use Cases :

EFS One Zone can be usefull where the data replication across AZ is not important consideration ( it is recommended to create EFS One Zone in the same AZ as compute resource for better performance.) Customer can use EFS One Zone for Development, build , staging environments or where data.

Thinking of moving to One Zone Class. Below are the two option for migration from EFS standard to EFS One Zone

Option 1 — Backup current EFS using AWS backup and restore it in specific AZ as EFS one Zone.

Option 2 — Use AWS DataSync to copy the data from current EFS filesystem to another.

Thank you for reading.

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