Amazon EFS Storage Classes

Overview

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is designed to provide serverless, fully elastic file storage that lets you share file data without provisioning or managing storage capacity and performance. Amazon EFS offers a range of storage classes that you can choose from based on the performance, data access, and cost requirements of your workloads Amazon EFS supports three storage classes to support virtually any workload, including those with demanding performance needs, data residency requirements, unknown or changing access patterns, or seldomly accessed files.

EFS supports two different types of file systems to meet your data availability and resiliency needs. EFS regional file systems (recommended) offer the highest levels of durability and availability by storing data across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). Amazon EFS One Zone file systems store data redundantly within a single AZ and are cost-optimized for workloads that do not require Multi-AZ resilience, so data in these file systems will be unavailable and may be lost during a disaster or other fault within the AZ.

Each individual EFS file system supports multiple storage classes, and EFS automatically moves files across storage classes using Amazon EFS Lifecycle Management. Once you set your file system’s lifecycle policy, your files will automatically move across storage classes based on workload access patterns and this data movement is completely transparent to your end users and applications.

Storage classes

Amazon EFS Standard (EFS Standard)

Amazon EFS Standard storage class is built on high-speed SSD storage to deliver sub-millisecond latency performance for your active application data. EFS Standard is designed for data that is accessed or modified frequently and requires high durability and availability.

With its high performance, EFS Standard is appropriate for a broad spectrum of use cases that include storage for containerized and serverless applications, application development, machine learning training, quantitative investment research, web serving and content management, home directories, and database backups. It also works well for applications such as data analytics, simulation and media transcoding.

Amazon EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA)

Amazon EFS’s cost-optimized storage classes offer a combination of low cost and high performance, making them ideal for delivering automatic storage cost savings for files that are less frequently accessed. These storage classes provide the same durability, as well as the same throughput and IOPS scalability, as EFS Standard, with low per GB storage prices and per GB tiering and access charges.These storage classes can be used for keeping files accessible to satisfy audit requirements, performing historical analysis, performing backups, and as a data store for disaster recovery files.

Amazon EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA)

EFS Infrequent Access storage class is cost-optimized for data that is accessed only a few times a quarter and that does not need the sub-millisecond latencies of EFS Standard. EFS IA offers a storage price up to 95% lower compared to EFS Standard. EFS IA storage is compatible with all Amazon EFS features, and is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon EFS is available.

Amazon EFS Archive (EFS Archive)

EFS Archive storage class is cost-optimized for data that is accessed only a few times a year or less and that does not need the sub-millisecond latencies of EFS Standard. EFS Archive offers a storage price up to 50% lower compared to EFS Infrequent Access, providing a more cost-optimized experience for cold, rarely-accessed data. EFS Archive is optimized for and supported on EFS Regional file systems using EFS’s default Elastic Throughput mode.

Comparison

Comparing Amazon EFS Storage Classes

Storage class	Designed for	First byte read latency	Durability (designed for)¹	Availability SLA	Availability zones	Minimum billing charge per file²	Minimum storage duration
EFS Standard	Active data requiring fast sub-millisecond latency performance	Sub-millisecond	99.999999999% (11 9's)	99.99% (Regional) 99.9% (One Zone)	=>3 (Regional) 1 (One Zone)	Not applicable	Not applicable
EFS Infrequent Access	Inactive data that is accessed only a few times each quarter	Tens of milliseconds		99.99% (Regional) 99.9% (One Zone)	=>3 (Regional) 1 (One Zone)	128 KiB	Not applicable
EFS Archive	Inactive data that is accessed a few times each year or less	Tens of milliseconds		99.9% (Regional)	=>3 (Regional)	128 KiB	90 days

Note
¹Because One Zone file systems store data in a single AWS Availability Zone, data that is stored in these types of file systems might be lost in the event of a disaster or other fault that affects all copies of the data within the Availability Zone, or in the event of Availability Zone destruction.

²Lifecycle policies updated on or after 12 PM PT, November 26, 2023 will tier files of < 128 KiB to the IA class. For more information about how Amazon EFS meters and bills for individual files and metadata, see Metering: How Amazon EFS reports file system and object sizes.