Introduction to AMAZON ELASTIC FILE SYSTEM: Step by Step AEFS Replication Guide

1. Introduction to Amazon Elastic File System

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. Amazon EFS features a simple web services interface that allows you to establish and configure file systems rapidly and easily. You don’t have to worry about installing, patching, or maintaining intricate file system configurations because the service takes care of everything.

2. Amazon EFS Storage Classes

Amazon EFS offers four storage classes, and they work in pairs. The EFS One Zone and One Zone-IA storage classes are intended to provide data in a single Availability Zone with continuous availability. Since Amazon EFS stores data in a single AWS Availability Zone, data stored in these storage classes may be lost if a disaster affects all copies of the data within the Availability Zone or the Availability Zone is destroyed. The EFS Standard and Standard-IA storage classes are regional storage classes that are designed to ensure data availability even if one or more Availability Zones in an AWS Region are unavailable. They provide the highest availability and durability by redundantly storing file system data and metadata across multiple geographically separated Availability Zones within a Region.

3. Amazon EFS Replication

Amazon EFS replication can be used to create a replica of your Amazon EFS file system in your preferred AWS Region. When you enable EFS file system replication, it automatically and transparently copies the data and metadata from the source file system to a new destination EFS file system. In addition, it uses a replication configuration to manage the process of creating the destination file system and maintaining it in sync with the source file system.

Amazon EFS automatically maintains synchronization between the source and destination file systems. In addition, Amazon EFS replication is continuous, with a recovery point objective (RPO) of minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes. These capabilities should help you achieve your compliance and business continuity objectives.

Learn more about RTO and RPO in this blog.

4. Creating Amazon Elastic File System

Step 1: Sign in to the AWS console and search for EFS in the search bar and select the service

Step 2: Click on Create File system button

Step 3: Provide the EFS details as below:

• Provide an appropriate name for EFS
• Select the VPC of your choice. Here we have selected default VPC
• Choose appropriate availability and durability
• Otherwise, select the customize button to get more options, i.e., life cycle management policy, security groups, throughput, etc
• Next, click on Create
  
  

Step 4: Once EFS is created, the successful creation of the EFS message is popped up on the top. Select the file which is created to see the more details

5. Creating Replication for Amazon EFS

Step 5: To create replication for EFS, click on create replication

Step 6: Provide the replication details as below:

• Choose the region to replicate the file system
• Choose the appropriate availability and durability of your choice
• By default, your destination file is encrypted. Otherwise, you can create your key and use it
• Click on Create replication
  
  

Step 7: Once the replication is created, you can view the successful creation of the replication message for EFS as shown below:

Note: The replicated file is read-only in the destination region.

Step 8: To monitor the EFS replication activity, go to the CloudWatch service

Step 9: A new CloudWatch metric, TimeSinceLastSync is generated when the replica is created as shown below:

6. Conclusion

The new replication feature is now available in Amazon EFS. The replication for EFS is helpful to maintain backup data in different regions. Amazon EFS replica saves up to 75% in disaster recovery storage costs. It is also beneficial to meet business continuity goals and compliance. Amazon EFS is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of durability and high availability. You can use Amazon EFS Replication to automatically maintain a copy of your Amazon EFS file system in a Region or AZ of your choice, using the Amazon EFS console, AWS CLI, and APIs to enable replication on an existing file system.

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8. FAQs

1. How do I manage a file system?

Amazon EFS is a fully managed service. The file storage infrastructure is already managed for you. When you use Amazon EFS, you avoid the complexity of deploying and maintaining complex file system infrastructure. An Amazon EFS file system grows and shrinks automatically as you add and remove files, so you don’t need to manage storage procurement or provisioning.

You can administer a file system through the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the Amazon EFS API (and various language-specific SDKs). The console, API, and SDK can create and delete file systems, configure how file systems are accessed, create and edit file system tags, enable features such as Provisioned Throughput and Lifecycle Management, and display detailed information about file systems.

2. How is Amazon EFS designed to provide high durability and availability?

By default, every EFS file system object (such as directory, file, and link) is redundantly stored across multiple AZs for file systems using Standard storage classes. If you select Amazon EFS One Zone storage classes, your data is redundantly stored within a single AZ. Amazon EFS is designed to sustain concurrent device failures by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. In addition, using Standard storage classes, a file system can be accessed concurrently from all AZs in the Region where it is located. You can architect your application to failover from one AZ to other AZs in the Region to ensure the highest application availability. Mount targets are highly available within an AZ for all EFS storage classes. For more information on availability.

3. How does EFS Replication work?

When you enable EFS Replication on a file system, Amazon EFS automatically creates a new file system in the destination region and begins copying your data. Once the initial copy is completed, EFS Replication copies change incrementally to deliver an RPO of minutes for most file systems. EFS Replication preserves all metadata, such as owners and permissions, when copying changes to files and folders. While EFS Replication is enabled, your destination file system is in read-only mode and can be updated only by EFS Replication. If your source file system is unavailable, you can failover to the destination file system by deleting Replication. Deleting the Replication makes the destination file system writeable for your applications.

WRITTEN BY Suresh Kumar Reddy

Yerraballi Suresh Kumar Reddy is working as a Research Associate - Data and AI/ML at CloudThat. He is a self-motivated and hard-working Cloud Data Science aspirant who is adept at using analytical tools for analyzing and extracting meaningful insights from data.