Basically, since we have a bunch of EC2 instances that require a central attached drive, an NFS box was setup (this was before EFS was available in our zone). Is there any reason to (or not to) switch to EFS in this case?
1 Answer
It depends on how you set up your EC2/NFS instance - does it have Highly Available capabilities like fail over in case of node failure? Do you monitor the disk space and extend it if you're running short?
EFS is highly available and has virtually unlimited storage. The EFS storage is more expensive than your instance EBS storage but you get a managed, highly available service for the price and you don't pay any hourly price for EC2.
Also note that by default you get higher throughput when you store more data on EFS, however you can purchase Provisioned Throughput to get the required bandwidth even if you don't have a lot of data on it.
Whether or not to switch to EC2/NFS to EFS depends on your circumstances. Do your homework, do some price analysis, include the cost of possible EC2 failure (how many other servers / services depend on it?), etc and decide based on that. I would say yes, switch to EFS because of all the features it provides but YMMV.
Hope that helps :)
