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Coming Soon: Amazon Elastic File System Storage
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announced at its recent summit a new storage option to work with multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances at the same time.
Among its current storage options is Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), designed for storage-attached network (SAN)-style block storage with disk volumes that can hook up to one EC2 instance at a time, the company said.
Coming sometime this summer, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) will work with more than one EC2 instance concurrently.
"It provides multiple EC2 instances with low-latency, shared access to a fully managed file system via the popular NFSv4 protocol, and is designed to perform well for a wide variety of workloads, with the ability to scale to thousands of concurrent connections," company exec Jeff Barr said in a blog post.
Possible use cases envisioned by AWS for the new service include content repositories, app development, Web server farms, Big Data applications and more.
The storage service can scale to petabyte sizes, with users paying $0.30 per gigabyte per month for their actual usage.
"EFS is designed to support the security requirements of large, complex organizations," Barr said. "You'll be able to use [AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)] to grant access to the EFS APIs, along with [Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)] security groups to control network access to file systems. You'll be able to use standard file and directory permissions (good old chown and chmod) to control access to the directories, files, and links stored on your file systems."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.