AWS reduces file storage cost for Amazon EFS Infrequent Access
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reduced pricing for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) Infrequent Access (IA), touting the move as saving customers up to 92% on file storage costs.
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The company called the price reduction one of the largest in AWS Cloud history in a blog post published on Wednesday.
The new reduced pricing allows customers to store and access their files natively in a file system for effectively $0.08/GB per month.
EFS is a fully-managed, cloud-native NFS file system for Linux-based workloads that can be used with AWS services and on-premises resources. EFS provides elastic storage, growing and shrinking automatically as files are created or deleted, without disruption.
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"As storage grows, the likelihood that a given application needs access to all of the files all of the time lessens, and access patterns can also change over time," the blog post penned by AWS senior technical evangelist Steve Roberts said.
"Two common drivers for moving applications to the cloud are to maximize operational efficiency and to reduce the total cost of ownership, and this applies equally to storage costs."
To fix this, AWS EFS IA with Lifecycle Management provides a performance tier suitable for files that are not accessed regularly, instead of keeping all of the data on hand on the fastest performing storage.
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EFS Lifecycle Management runs automatically behind the scenes, and when enabled on a file system, files that are not accessed according to the lifecycle policy chosen by the customer will be moved automatically to the cost-optimized EFS IA storage class, the cloud giant explained.
Although the infrequently accessed data is held in a different storage tier, it's still immediately accessible. The only trade-off, AWS said, is slightly higher per operation latency for the files in the IA storage tier.
At February launch, the the EFS IA storage class was priced at $0.045/GB per month; AWS has reduced that to $0.025/GB per month.
Amazon Elastic File System IA with Lifecycle Management is available now in all regions where Elastic File System is present.