What is the difference between Amazon FSx and EFS?

Question

Could someone tell me what is the difference between Amazon FSx and EFS?

Answer 1

Amazon FSx is a fully managed AWS service that offers the most popular file systems that are commercially licensed with rich sets of features, for avoiding time constraints of setting up and configuring your own file systems from scratch and the associated costs with it. This service also offers you hardware provisioning, patching, backing up and software configuration all in a cost-effective, reliable, and secure way, just like any other AWS service. Amazon FSx comes in two options: Amazon FSx for Windows Server, and Amazon FSx for Lustre.

Whereas, Amazon EFS or Elastic File System, is an AWS service, that offers you a fully managed elastic NFS file system, to use with AWS Cloud services or in on-premises setup. With Amazon EFS, you can scale up or down based on demand, without affecting other application functioning, etc. all with the similar offerings of other AWS services, of providing cost-effective, reliable, integration, etc. If you are interested in knowing more about Amazon FSx, watch the below-posted video on AWS FSX Tutorial to get a better idea. And if you are aiming for AWS certification, check out the AWS certification course from Intellipaat.

Answer 2

Both are the storage of files from AWS; however, each service is built for a specific usage scenario. Amazon FSx is a managed file system with specific applications of Windows File Server and Lustre. Therefore, Amazon FSx is suited better to applications in the enterprise environment as well as those for high-performance computing. It supports access protocols such as SMB for Windows and POSIX for Lustre and, depending on the selected file system, its performance can be optimized for either high-throughput or low-latency workloads. The pricing of FSx depends on the provisioned storage in addition to other features that include backups.

Amazon EFS is a high-performance, general-purpose, shared file storage solution intended for use with Amazon EC2 and on-premises servers. It will be best suited for applications like web applications, content management systems, and workloads that require shared access among multiple instances. EFS uses the NFS protocol for Linux-based access and scales storage and throughput dynamically as needed to provide a very easy to understand pay as you go pricing model that is based on the total amount of storage used.

To put it in brief, FSx is tailored for file systems and has high performance requirements while EFS is designed to scale shared file storage for multiple usage instances.