Introducing Amazon Elastic File System

AWS, for one, has really put in a lot of innovation and effort to come up with some really awesome services, and one such service that I personally feel has tremendous potential is the Elastic File System. Why is it so important? Well, to answer this question, we need to take a small step back and understand what type of storage services AWS offers at the moment.

First up, we have the object stores in the form of Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Although virtually infinite in scaling capacity, both these services are known to be a tad slower performance-wise compared to the EC2 instance storage and the EBS. This is bound to happen, as the likes of EBS is specially designed to provide fast and durable block storage, but, as a trade-off, you cannot extend an EBS volume across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic File System or EFS, on the other hand, provides a mix of both worlds by giving you the performance of an EBS volume combined with the availability...