Posted On: Jul 24, 2020

The Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) CSI driver is now generally available. The EFS CSI driver makes it simple to configure elastic file storage for both EKS and self-managed Kubernetes clusters running on Amazon Web Services using standard Kubernetes interfaces. Applications running in Kubernetes can use EFS file systems to share data between pods in a scale-out group, or with other applications running within or outside of Kubernetes. EFS can also help Kubernetes applications be highly available because all data written to EFS is written to multiple Amazon Web Services China regions Availability zones. If a Kubernetes pod is terminated and relaunched, the CSI driver will reconnect the EFS file system, even if the pod is relaunched in a different Amazon Web Services China regions Availability Zone.

With the 1.0 release, the EFS CSI driver now has in-transit encryption enabled by default, helping companies meet their security and compliance goals. Additionally, the driver now supports EFS Access Points, application-specific entry points into an EFS file system that make it easier to share a file system between multiple pods. Access points can enforce a user identity for all file system requests that are made through the access point, and enforce a root directory for each pod. 

Some examples of applications that can benefit from Kubernetes and elastic, durable shared storage are content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, developer tools like JIRA and Jenkins, machine learning frameworks like MXNet and Tensorflow, and data science tools like Jupyter and Airflow.  

To get started, follow the getting started documentation to create a Kubernetes StorageClass and a PersistentVolumeClaim to provision, then reference the PersistentVolumeClaim from the pods that use it. To learn more, you can visit the Amazon EKS product page and the Amazon EFS product page.