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Amazon Elastic File System

Amazon EFS provides elastic, shared NFS file systems that can be mounted concurrently by Linux workloads across Availability Zones.

Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with Amazon Elastic File System.

Amazon Elastic File System pricing and cost programs

Pricing model: Elastic file storage usage

On-Demand
Available
Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
Not applicable
Savings Plans
Not applicable
Spot
Not applicable

Billing dimensions: Storage class · Throughput mode · Read and write access · Replication and backup

Programs and modes: Regional and One Zone · Lifecycle management · Elastic and provisioned throughput

Storage class, throughput mode, and access patterns determine the bill.

Free Tier: Available — verify current offers

Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.

Official AWS pricing

Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.

Why implement Amazon Elastic File System?

  • Grows and shrinks storage automatically while allowing many EC2 instances, containers, and supported serverless workloads to share files through NFS.
  • Offers Regional or One Zone availability choices, lifecycle-managed storage classes, and elastic or provisioned throughput modes.
  • Removes file-server capacity management, hardware replacement, and multi-AZ storage replication for supported Linux file workloads.

How to implement Amazon Elastic File System

  1. Choose Regional or One Zone availability, performance and throughput modes, encryption, lifecycle policies, and backup requirements.
  2. Create mount targets in required subnets, restrict NFS traffic with security groups, and create access points for workload-specific paths and POSIX identities.
  3. Mount with current efs-utils or the EFS CSI driver using TLS, then monitor throughput, burst credits where applicable, client behavior, and storage-class transitions.

Amazon Elastic File System best practices

  • Use Regional file systems for multi-AZ production availability, encryption in transit and at rest, and access points plus IAM authorization where supported.
  • Use General Purpose performance mode and Elastic throughput for most workloads, then measure I/O size, metadata intensity, throughput, and client concurrency before tuning.
  • Back up important file systems, restrict NFS access, keep clients current, and test how applications handle transient mount or network failures.

Amazon Elastic File System use cases and server impact

  • Shared web content and application files
  • Container and serverless shared storage
  • Linux home directories and content-management systems

Replaces scalable NFS server clusters and storage capacity planning, while applications still manage POSIX permissions, file locking, and client mount behavior.

Official implementation resources

Commonly paired AWS services

Planning guides that use Amazon Elastic File System