Implementing Shared File Storage with Amazon EFS

In our earlier discussion, we looked at Amazon EBS. These block storage volumes are directly attached to a specific EC2 instance and act as virtual hard drives for your EC2 instance. In general, an EBS volume can only be attached to one specific EC2 instance at a given time. This means that if you deploy 20 EC2 instances, each one of the instances will have one or more EBS volumes attached. This is perfectly fine if the data between those volumes does not need to be shared across those EC2 instances.

There are multiple use cases for sharing data across EC2 instances. These include file shares or data that needs to be shared across multiple applications and web servers. In those cases, using EBS volumes would create a messy architecture of having to somehow replicate data between those individual EBS volumes.

Amazon offers the EFS solution, which allows you to create and mount file shares across multiple EC2 instances. These instances...