Amazon Elastic File System

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a file storage service for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Amazon EFS is easy to use and provides a simple interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.

EFS volumes can be used by multiple EC2 instances (unlike EBS volumes).

• Supports the Network File System version 4 (NFSv4) protocol.
• You only pay for the storage you use (no pre-provisioning required).
• Can scale up to the petabytes.
• Can support thousands of concurrent NFS connections.
• Data is stored across multiple AZs within a region.
• Read after write consistency.
• EFS is block-based storage (not object-based storage).
• You can apply file and directory permissions.