Amazon Elastic File System

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a cloud file sharing service with Network File System (NFS) capabilities. NFS file shares are used as storage for Linux-based applications. EFS storages can only be mounted on Linux machines.

An EFS storage is provided by default in every project space that supports Ansys 2024 R2 and newer releases. When creating an autoscaling cluster, you can choose to mount the default EFS storage to the cluster or create a new EFS storage at that time. Any EFS storages available in a project space are automatically mounted on Linux virtual desktops in that project space.

Amazon EFS offers:

  • Secured file sharing with fast, easy access to files

  • Ability to share large datasets across multiple resources

  • Ability to increase and decrease its storage capacity as files are added and removed (ideal when you are unsure of how much data is going to be added to the store)

  • Persistent storage, meaning data is not lost when the instance is shut down

  • Pay-as-you-go model where you pay only for the storage that you use

Best use cases for EFS:

  • Central file management system where files need to be accessed and managed by multiple users

  • Installation of applications on autoscaling cluster

  • General-purpose workloads where large datasets need to be accessed and processed by distributed systems

For more information, see Amazon Elastic File System in the AWS documentation.

To see how EFS compares to other storage types, see Comparison of Amazon Storage Types.