Elastic File System (EFS) provides a file-storage service that can be accessed simultaneously by many instances, similar to Network Attached Storage (NAS). While not as fast as EBS, it still provides low-latency access. As it may be accessed by multiple clients at a time, it can reach much higher levels of throughput than EBS. EFS filesystems also in size scale dynamically and so do not need to be preallocated or modified during use. Filesystems are stored redundantly across AZs.
Some recommended use cases for EFS are:
- Home directories
- Serving shared web content
- Content management
EFS performance scales according to the filesystem size. As the filesystem size is not preallocated, the only way to increase your performance is to add more data to it.