Amazon FSx

Amazon FSx

Amazon FSx for Windows

  • EFS is a shared POSIX file system for Linux, meaning it can not be used with Windows
  • FSx for Windows is a fully managed Windows file system share drive
  • Supports SMB protocol and Windows NTFS
  • It has Active Directory integration, ACLs and user quotas
  • It is built on top of SSD, it can scale up to 10s of GB/s, millions of IOPS and 100s PB of data
  • It can accessed from on-premise infrastructure
  • It can be configured to be Multi-AZ (high availability)
  • Data is backed-up daily to S3

Amazon FSx for Lustre

  • Lustre is a type of parallel distributed file system for large-scale computing
  • Lustre is derived from “Linux” and “cluster”
  • FSx for Lustre is used with machine learning and High Performance Computing (HPC), example: video processing, financial modelling, electronic design automation
  • Scales up to 100s GB/s, millions of IOPS, sub-ms latencies
  • It has seamless integration with S3
    • Can “read” S3 as a file system
    • Can write the output of the computations back to S3
  • It can be used with on-premise servers

Storage Comparison

  • S3: Object Storage
  • Glacier: Object Archival
  • EFS: Network File System for Linux instances, POSIX filesystem
  • FSx for Windows: Network File System for Windows servers
  • FSx for Lustre: High Performance Computing for Linux systems
  • EBS volumes: Network storage for one EC2 instance at a time
  • Instance Storage: Physical storage for EC2 instance (high IOPS)
  • Storage Gateway
  • Snowball / Snowmobile: move large data to the cloud, physical