Overview

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is designed to provide serverless, fully elastic file storage that helps you share file data without provisioning or managing storage capacity and performance. There is no minimum fee or setup charge. You pay only for the primary and backup storage you use and for your read, write, and tiering activity to your EFS file system. You pay for read and write access using Elastic Throughput (but you can optionally provision throughput performance up front using Provisioned Throughput), and for read and tiering activity to EFS’s Infrequent Access and Archive storage classes.

EFS offers price advantages over many self-managed cloud alternatives, delivering a total cost of ownership (TCO) as low as $0.0315/GB, with performance that automatically scales to tens of GB/s and hundreds of thousands of IOPS. For more information on how much you can save, see the EFS Pricing examples and the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) example here.

Amazon EFS offers three storage classes: EFS Standard, SSD-based storage which delivers sub-millisecond latencies for actively-used data; EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA), cost-optimized storage which delivers milliseconds latencies for data accessed only a few times a quarter; and EFS Archive, cost-optimized storage which delivers milliseconds latencies for long-lived data accessed a few times a year or less. 

Amazon EFS also offers data protection for your files with EFS Replication and EFS Backup. With EFS Replication, you pay the prevailing storage and read, write, and tiering activity rates for your source and destination EFS file systems, as well as any applicable charges for data transfer activity between them. With EFS Backup, you pay for the amount of backup storage you use and the amount of backup data you restore in the month. Visit AWS Backup to learn more.

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Pricing table

Within your first 12 months on AWS, you can use up to 5 GB/month on the EFS Standard storage class at no charge.

  • Regional (Multi-AZ) with Elastic Throughput
  • Regional file systems provide the highest levels of availability and durability by storing file system data and metadata redundantly across multiple geographically separated Availability Zones within a Region. They are designed to provide continuous availability to data, even when one or more Availability Zones in an AWS Region are unavailable.

    Elastic Throughput is the default throughput mode and recommended for most workloads. With Elastic Throughput, performance automatically scales with your workload activity and you only pay for the throughput you use (data transferred for your file systems per month).

  • Regional (Multi-AZ) with legacy throughput modes
  • Regional file systems provide the highest levels of availability and durability by storing file system data and metadata redundantly across multiple geographically separated Availability Zones within a Region. They provide resilience against the permanent loss of an entire data center.

    Provisioned Throughput allows you to configure throughput performance upfront. You should use Provisioned Throughput if you have predictable and high levels of sustained throughput requirements. Your Provisioned Throughput amount billed in a month is based on the average throughput provisioned in excess of the baseline throughput included with your EFS Standard storage usage. See Amazon EFS Throughput Modes for more details.

  • One Zone (Single-AZ)
  • One Zone file systems redundantly store data within a single Availability Zone (AZ) and are ideal for applications that do not require the Multi-AZ availability and durability offered by Amazon EFS Regional file systems. They are designed to provide continuous availability to data within a single AZ in an AWS Region.

  • Replication and Data transfer
  • You are charged the prevailing EC2 data transfer rates for cross-AZ or cross-Region activity when you access your EFS file system, including when using EFS Replication to replicate file system data across AZs or Regions.


    Replication and data transfer within the same AWS Region
    There are no data transfer charges when accessing an EFS mount target from within the same Availability Zone (AZ), or when replicating data across EFS file systems within the same AZ.


    If you access your EFS mount target from another AZ, you will be charged the EC2 cross-AZ data transfer rate ($0.01/GB) for data transfer “in” and “out” of the AZ. If you replicate EFS One Zone file system data across AZs for, you pay the EC2 cross-AZ data transfer rate for data transfer “out” from the source AZ.


    For more information, refer to Data Transfer within the same AWS Region on the Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing page.


    Replication and data transfer across AWS Regions
    Replication and data transfer activity across AWS Regions are subject to EC2 cross-Region data transfer rates. If you replicate data across Regions, you pay the EC2 inter-Region data transfer rate for data transfer “out” of the source Region.
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    For more information, refer to Data Transfer on the Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing page.

EFS Pricing Details

Except as otherwise noted, our prices are exclusive of applicable taxes and duties, including VAT and applicable sales tax. For customers with a Japanese billing address, use of AWS is subject to Japanese Consumption Tax. To learn more, visit our consumption tax FAQs.

Amazon EFS storage usage is calculated in binary gigabytes (GB), where 1 GB is 230 bytes. See File system metering for additional details on how EFS storage and throughput usage are metered to calculate your EFS bill.

For EFS pricing examples, go to the Pricing and Billing or use the AWS Pricing Calculator.

AWS Free Tier

As part of the AWS Free Tier, you can get started with EFS for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 5 GB of EFS Standard storage with a Regional file system for 12 months. The AWS Free Tier is not applicable to files stored in the One Zone storage file system type.  

Your usage for the Free Tier is calculated each month across all AWS Regions except the AWS GovCloud Region and automatically applied to your bill; unused monthly usage will not roll over. Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.

Backup

Backing up your EFS file data can be managed simply with AWS Backup. EFS backups are powered by AWS Backup, a fully managed backup service that makes it easy to centralize and automate the backup of data across AWS services. AWS Backup provides you with a single place to monitor backup activity and to find and restore backups when needed. With AWS Backup, you pay only for the amount of backup storage you use and the amount of backup data you restore in the month. There is no minimum fee and there are no setup charges.

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