hands-on lab

Introduction to the Elastic File System

Difficulty: Beginner
Duration: Up to 1 hour
Students: 13,218
Rating: 4.8/5
Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.
Learn and validateUse validations to check your solutions every step of the way.
See resultsTrack your knowledge and monitor your progress.

Description

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides simple, scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. 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.

Amazon EFS has a simple web services interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. The service manages all the file storage infrastructure for you, avoiding the complexity of deploying, patching, and maintaining complex file system deployments. 

By completing this hands-on lab, you will be able to create and configure your first Amazon Elastic File System using the AWS Management Console.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this beginner-level lab, you will be able to:

  • Create file systems
  • Mount file systems to EC2 instances
  • Read/write files to a file system

Intended Audience

  • Candidates for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam
  • Candidates for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam
  • Cloud Engineers and Architects that need to deploy and configure an Amazon Elastic File System solution in their environment
  • Cloud Administrators and Support Analysts that need to manage and configure an Amazon Elastic File System solution in their environment

Prerequisites

This is a beginner-level lab, however, in order to follow the next steps you should be able to:

  • Describe and launch EC2 instances
  • Connect to an EC2 instance using SSH
  • Describe, create and configure Security Groups

You can complete Create your first Amazon EC2 instance (Linux) as a prerequisite.

Updates 

January 22nd, 2024 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest user-interface changes

February 24th, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

December 3rd, 2021 - Added emphasis to ensure the correct security group is attached in the EFS configuration

June 24th, 2021 - Replaced SSH instructions with EC2 Instance Connect lab step, minor content, and screenshot updates.

June 10th, 2021 - Improved lab formatting and screenshots for an improved learning experience. Updated content to reflect the latest AWS Console experience.

July 22nd, 2020 - Updated instructions/screenshots because of the new AWS EFS UI

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation lab step to check the work you perform in the lab

Environment before

Environment after

Covered topics

Lab steps

Logging In to the Amazon Web Services Console
Creating an Amazon Elastic File System
Connecting to the Virtual Machine using EC2 Instance Connect
Mounting a File System
Retrieving files from EFS