EBS vs EFS
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Last updated
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Choosing the correct storage solution for your AWS workloads is not easy. There are many services with different storage types and feature sets, so it's easy to get overwhelmed when you're in the comparison stage of your cloud optimization journey.
In this article, we will compare two major storage services: Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Elastic File Service (Amazon EFS). Both of these services provide a great solution for applications that need to access data through the file system.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy-to-use, high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for workloads that require transaction speed and High throughput at any scale.
Customers often use EBS for most types of work such as databases, applications, email, file storage, backups or websites. EBS volumes are easy to create, configure, and can be expanded to deliver extreme IO performance. These volumes are always available and durable. Although EBS are not replicated across multiple Availability Zones, they are replicated to multiple servers in the same AZ. Thus delivering 99.99% availability and up to 99.999% durability. Users can also encrypt EBS for data security.
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a managed Network File System (NFS). It is designed for EC2 instances on Linux, some managed AWS services, and on-premise servers. It is similar to a storage system for Windows servers – Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. But FSx uses Server Message Block (SMB) protocol while EFS uses NFS.
EFS is a fully managed file system, for use across a variety of machines and availability zones. While, EBS is designed as a fast and reliable block storage for single machines (not to mention multi-attach EBS, an exception that only applies in specific situations).
So what are the differences between the two storage systems?
Like a physical hard drive, an EBS volume attaches to only one EC2 (except in multi-attach cases). The EC2 instance needs to be in the same availability zone as the EBS volume. Files in an EBS volume are accessible using a file system such as ext3, ext4, or xfs.
While EFS file system can be mounted on multiple machines in any availability zone or even from on-premise servers. Thousands of machines can connect to the same EFS directory. Access the file system through the NFS protocol.
EBS volumes can be attached to both Windows and non-Windows EC2 machines. But EFS drives are only designed for Linux-based servers.
While the maximum size of an EBS volume can be up to 16 TB, the size of an EFS volume is practically unlimited. The maximum file size in EFS is 47.9 TB.
Although EBSs are not replicated across multiple Availability Zones, they are replicated to multiple servers in the same AZ, thus providing 99.99% availability and up to 99.999% durability. Users can also encrypt EBS for data security.
Like EBS, EFS also offers high durability. However, the main difference lies in scalability. EFS volumes can scale up quickly and automatically to meet sudden increases in workload demand and scale down when load is reduced. This makes EFS more flexible than EBS.
This scalability also eliminates the need for EFS to pre-estimate specific sizes and results in significant cost savings.
Backup and encryption at rest are available on both systems.
EFS also offers lifecycle management, a savings feature similar to S3. EFS lifecycle management allows you to automatically migrate infrequently accessed data to a separate storage class.
EFS Lifecycle Management EFS Lifecycle management
You can configure EBS to minimize disk latency. This can be done by selecting different storage types (SSD, HDD, etc.), specifying provisioned IOPS, and selecting EBS-optimized EC2 instances.
However, EFS is not configurable like EBS. While the underlying performance is fast enough for most workloads, it can't deliver as low disk latency per IO operation as EBS. But EFS – which is a distributed file storage system – can handle much higher throughput per second than EBS.
The cost of EBS or EFS increases as performance needs increase. However, as a general rule, EBS will be cheaper than EFS for the same performance per GB.
So, when should you choose which service?
If you need to access data from different machines or from different availability zones, EFS is probably the best choice for you.
EFS is best suited for enterprise file servers, backup systems, large Big Data clusters, Massively Parallel Processing(MPP) systems, Content Distribution Networks (CDN), and other large use cases.
EFS is also for systems that require a lot of throughput.
If you need very low latency disks, EBS is probably the best choice.
EBS is best suited for relational and NoSQL databases, enterprise applications such as ERP systems, mail servers, SharePoint, web servers, directory servers, DNS servers or middleware. That's because these systems typically don't run on large clusters and therefore don't need to be mounted. Replication between servers is done at the application level, not at the disk level. And existing EBSs can meet the performance requirements.
