Amazon unveils new storage service Amazon EFS

Amazon has announced the launch of its new storage service, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), which provides a common file system for multiple (Elastic Compute Cloud) EC2 virtual machines on Amazon Web Services (AWS) through the standard NFSv4 protocol. Amazon said that the new service will preview in the near future.

According to TechCrunch, EFS will work with most existing file system tools and applications, because it supports the standard NFS protocol, so developers can simply mount and manage them with any standard file system tool. Andy Jassy, Amazon's head of AWS pointed out that the company's customers have been asking for this kind of service for some time now.

Companies can manage their entire file systems in a similar manner as to how they now treat objects on AWS with EFS. All EFS storage is SSD-based, so throughput and latency shouldn't be an issue. Data is also automatically replicated across different availability zones. Like with other AWS services, users only have to pay for the storage they actually use.

Amazon says that at the time of release of the service, the price for using EFS will be US $0.30 per GB per month. EFS will be among Amazon's other file storage services, including S3 for object storage, Elastic Block Store for block storage and Glacier for archival storage.