Amazon rolls out FSx for Windows File Server

While the majority of workloads in the cloud are Linux-based, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy said he is well aware that Windows is still significant, and as a result, his company on Wednesday launched a new fully managed Windows file system built on native Windows file servers.

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Making the announcement during his keynote at AWS re:Invent, Jassy said the resulting product isn't initially what his company set out to do, but it is what customers wanted.

"What we were hoping to do was make this Windows file system work as part of EFS -- which would have been much easier for us to layer on another file system ... because it's much easier if you're trying to build a business at scale," he explained. However, he said customers wanted a native Windows file system and they "weren't being flexible".

"So we changed our approach," he continued.

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In other words, Windows file systems matter. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is designed to work with EFS.

"Customers want a fully compatible Windows file system," said Jassy. He said the approach to FSx for Windows File Server is similar to RDS in that it's designed to work with multiple use cases and systems.

Jassy also launched FSx for Lustre, a fully managed file system for compute sensitive workloads.

"There are other types of workloads you really don't have a file system for," Jassy explained, citing HPC workloads that are high scale, low throughput, and need massive parallel scale out. "There's nothing here that works as a file system for these types of workloads," he said.

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FSx for Lustre offers very high throughput at hundreds of Gb/s. Thousands of simultaneous clients (EC2 instances and on-premises servers) can drive millions of IOPS. It offers seamless integration with S3, and each file system is backed by NVMe SSD storage, provisioned in increments of 3.6 TiB.

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Disclosure: Asha Barbaschow travelled to AWS re:Invent as a guest of AWS