AWS EFS vs EBS Multi-Attach
EFS vs EBS Multi-Attach features
- Elastic File Store – EFS is a file storage service for use with Amazon compute (EC2, containers, serverless) and on-premises servers. EFS provides a file system interface, file system access semantics (such as strong consistency and file locking), and concurrently accessible storage for up to thousands of EC2 instances.
- Elastic Block Store – EBS is a block-level storage service for use with EC2. EBS can deliver performance for workloads that require the lowest-latency access to data from a single EC2 instance.
- Service type
- Elastic File Store is fully managed by AWS
- EBS needs to be managed by the user.
- Accessibility
- EFS can be accessed concurrently from all AZs in the Region.
- EBS Multi-Attach can be accessed concurrently from instances within the same AZ.
- Data Scalability
- EFS provides unlimited data storage
- EBS Multi-Attach has limits on the storage it can provide.
- Instance Scalability
- EFS can be attached to Tens, hundreds, or even thousands of compute instances.
- EBS Multi-Attach enabled volumes can be attached to up to 16 Linux instances built on the Nitro System.
- Supported Instances
- EFS is compatible with all Linux-based AMIs for EC2, POSIX file system (~Linux) that has a standard file API
- Multi-Attach enabled volumes can be attached to up to 16 Linux instances built on the Nitro System that are in the same AZ. Multi-Attach enabled volume can be attached to Windows instances, but the OS does not recognize the data on the volume that is shared between the instances, which can result in data inconsistency.
- Pricing
- EFS is priced as per the pay-as-you-use model
- EBS is priced as per the provisioned capacity
AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions
- Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
- AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
- AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
- Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
- A company wants to organize the contents of multiple websites in managed file storage. The company must be able to scale the storage based on demand without needing to provision storage. Multiple servers across multiple Availability Zones within a region should be able to access this storage concurrently. Which services should the Solutions Architect recommend?
- Amazon S3
- Amazon EBS Multi-Attach
- Amazon EFS
- AWS Storage Gateway – Volume gateway
