Posted On: Sep 2, 2021

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) now supports Intelligent-Tiering, a new capability that makes it easier for customers to optimize costs for shared file storage, even when access patterns change. EFS Intelligent-Tiering is designed to help you achieve the right price and performance blend for your application file data by placing your file data in a storage class based on file access patterns.

EFS Intelligent-Tiering uses Lifecycle Management to monitor the access patterns of your workload and is designed to automatically transition files that are not accessed for the duration of the Lifecycle policy (e.g. 30 days) from either the EFS Standard or EFS One Zone storage classes, to their corresponding Infrequent Access (IA) storage class (EFS Standard-Infrequent Access or EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access). This helps you take advantage of IA storage pricing that is up to 91% lower than the EFS Standard or EFS One Zone file storage pricing for workloads with changing access patterns.

Additionally, if access patterns change, EFS Intelligent-Tiering is designed to automatically move files back to performance-optimized (EFS Standard or EFS One Zone) storage classes. This helps you eliminate the risk of unbounded access charges, while providing consistent low latencies. If the files become infrequently accessed again, EFS Intelligent-Tiering is designed to transition the files back to IA based on your Lifecycle policy.

Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering is available in regions where Amazon EFS is available, including Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

To learn more, please read the documentation, and try it out using the Amazon EFS Console.