Why would you need EFS for Containers?

  • Shared Storage for Containers for High Availability: Useful for long running containers for resiliency and failures. Developer tools like GitHub, Artifactory and Jira need to share resources instantly with all of the containers.
  • Shared notebooks like Jupiter need durable storage for user workspaces for data scientists to collaborate.
  • Can be shared between many EC2 instances.
  • By default, EFS is isolated from the VPC as a private service. NFS client is connected via mount targets. It’s provisioned into a VPC and you set up POSIX permissions and made available to the VPC via Mount Targets that each of them has an IP address. Instances access the filesystem using these mount targets.
  • Lifecycle Policies can be used with Standard and Infrequent Access Classes.

Analytics

  • There will be lots of data sources that would understand how to write to a file system as well. For example, healthcare lab apps, life sciences or machine data in manufacturing. Having a standard interface is crucial where EFS is useful.
  • Lambda can access EFS for larger file systems. It has to be configured to use VPC networking for access.