Using Amazon EFS to Create Elastic File Systems for Linux-Based Workloads

This lesson dives into the AWS Elastic File Service - commonly known as EFS - and explains the service, its components, when it should be used, and how to configure it. EFS is considered file-level storage, supporting access by multiple EC2 instances at once, and is also optimized for low latency access. It appears to users like a file manager interface and uses standard file system semantics, such as locking files, renaming files, updating them, and using a hierarchical structure. This is just like what we're used to on standard premises-based systems.

The lesson kicks off with a high-level overview of EFS including its features, benefits, and use cases. This is followed by a review of the different storage class options it provides, namely Standard and Infrequent Access. A demonstration then provides a walk-through on how to configure an EFS file system within your VPC. The lesson covers how to secure your elastic file system, touching upon access control, permissions, and encryption as methods for protecting your data effectively. Finally, it moves on to importing existing on-premises data into EFS. If you want to cement your knowledge of this topic with hands-on experience, you can then try out the Introduction to Elastic File System lab.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the AWS Elastic File System along with its benefits and use cases
• Understand which performance and storage class to configure based upon your workloads
• Configure and create an elastic file system
• Mount EFS to your existing Linux instances
• Understand some security features and requirements of EFS
• Import existing data into your elastic file system

Intended Audience

This lesson has been created for:

• Storage engineers responsible for maintaining, managing and administering file-level storage 
• Security engineers who secure and safeguard data within AWS
• IT professionals preparing for either the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam or one of the three Associate-level certifications
• Those who are starting their AWS journey and want to understand the various services that exist and their use cases

Prerequisites:

To get the most from this lesson, you should be familiar with the basic concepts of AWS as well as with some of its core components, such as EC2 connectivity and configuration, in addition to VPC. You should also have an understanding of IAM permissions and how access is granted to resources.