Amazon EFS Infrequent Access
Save up to 94% on file storage
Amazon Elastic File System $0.025/GB-month(Amazon EFS) provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. Amazon EFS Infrequent Access is a storage class that provides price/performance that is cost-optimized for files accessed a few times a quarter, with storage prices up
to 94% lower compared to Amazon EFS Standard (EFS Standard). For EFS Regional file systems using Elastic Throughput, the EFS IA storage class costs only $0.016/GB-month1.
To get started with Infrequent Access (IA), simply enable Amazon EFS Lifecycle Management for your file system by selecting a lifecycle policy that matches your needs. Amazon EFS will automatically and transparently move your files to the lower cost regional EFS IA storage class based on the last time they were accessed. Amazon EFS transparently serves files from EFS Standard and Infrequent Access (IA) storage classes from a common file system namespace. You don't have to worry about which of your files are actively used and which are infrequently accessed. Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering offers an additional lifecycle policy that moves files back to EFS Standard automatically when they are accessed.
1pricing in US East (N. Virginia) region
Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering
EFS Intelligent-Tiering delivers automatic cost savings for workloads with changing access patterns by placing your file data in the appropriate storage class, at the right time, based on file access patterns.
EFS Lifecycle Management monitors your workload access patterns and automatically transition files that are not accessed for the duration of the lifecycle policy (e.g. 30 days) from the EFS Standard storage class to the Infrequent Access (IA) storage class. When you enable Intelligent-Tiering, if access patterns change and a file in EFS IA is read from or written to again, EFS will automatically moves that file back to EFS Standard, improving latency performance for subsequent access and eliminating the risk of unbounded access charges.
To use EFS Intelligent-Tiering, simply set a lifecycle policy to automatically move files back to EFS Standard if accessed.
Use cases for infrequent access storage classes
What these use cases have in common is they have unknown or changing access patterns. A low activity website becomes active once again, older reports in your document management system are referenced, or your machine learning inference datasets are re-used. Your data may be accessed from less accessed storage classes (such as EFS IA or EFS Archive). If this happens, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move files to the appropriate storage class, at the right time, based on file access patterns.
Backup and recovery
EFS IA cost-effectively stores file data, with industry-leading availability, security and durability enabling you to meet regulatory retention and compliance needs so your backups are protected and available if needed.
Analytics
Managing massive volumes of big data analytics can be costly and complex for workloads like genomics and geospatial applications. EFS IA cost-effectively stores large amounts of data while providing the same throughput used to scale applications with files stored in EFS Standard. If an analytics job is accessed later, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move this data to EFS Standard.
Document management
Many reporting systems for business applications rely on accessible shared file storage in support of business functions. With EFS IA, you can easily and cost-effectively store and access files from shared file systems, eliminating the need to manage data to control costs. If reports are accessed later, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move accessed reports to EFS Standard.
Media and content management
Web serving applications and content management systems store and serve media assets for websites, online publications, and archives. These assets become infrequently accessed after a period of time as content ages. You can easily store these infrequently accessed files in lower cost storage like EFS IA. If any of this content becomes active and is accessed once again, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move the accessed content to EFS Standard.
Data science and machine learning
Data science workloads rely on shared file storage to store machine learning training data and inference models. As this data ages you can cost-effectively store it in EFS IA. If datasets become active once again, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move this data to EFS Standard. What these use cases have in common is they have unknown or changing access patterns. A low activity website becomes active once again, older reports in your document management system are referenced, or your machine learning inference datasets are re-used. Your data may be accessed from infrequent access storage classes (such as EFS IA). If this happens, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move files to the appropriate storage class, at the right time, based on file access patterns.