EFS Storage Performance

Storage Performance Amazon EFS

Amazon EFS provides a serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system that can be accessed from various compute services within AWS and on-premises, such as:

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
  • Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
  • AWS Fargate
  • AWS Lambda

Amazon EFS delivers over 10 gibibytes per second (GiBps) of throughput, more than 500,000 IOPS, and latencies that are sub-millisecond or in the low single-digit milliseconds.

Performance Summary

File system performance is usually measured in latency, throughput, and I/O operations per second (IOPS). The performance of an Amazon EFS file system across these metrics depends on its configuration, including:

  • Storage Class: EFS One Zone or EFS Standard
  • Performance Mode: General Purpose or Max I/O
  • Throughput Mode: Bursting or Provisioned

Storage Classes and Performance

Amazon EFS utilizes two storage class types:

  • EFS One Zone Storage Classes: EFS One Zone and EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access (EFS One Zone-IA). Data is replicated within a single Availability Zone.
  • EFS Standard Storage Classes: EFS Standard and EFS Standard-IA. Data is replicated across multiple Availability Zones (Multi-AZ).

The first-byte latency for the IA storage classes is higher compared to the EFS Standard or EFS One Zone classes.

Performance Modes

Amazon EFS offers two performance modes: General Purpose and Max I/O:

  • General Purpose Mode: Supports up to 35,000 IOPS with the lowest per-operation latency. File systems with EFS One Zone storage classes always operate in General Purpose mode. For EFS Standard storage classes, you can choose between General Purpose (default) and Max I/O modes.
  • Max I/O Mode: Supports over 500,000 IOPS with higher per-operation latencies compared to General Purpose mode.

Content

  1. EFS - IOPS Optimization
  2. EFS - I/O Size and Sync Frequency
  3. EFS - Multithreaded
  4. Compare Common File Transfer Protocols