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by kleebeesh 2196 days ago
I've found EFS enticing in theory but painfully slow and riddled with issues in practice. In the past I've tried it thinking "it's basically an EBS volume I can mount on > 1 EC2 instance," only to find terrible read performance and misc. low-level NFS errors.
4 comments

Dunno your exact requirements or when you last tried it, but they did boost EFS's read speed (they claim by 400% [1]) as of this April, so it might be worth looking into again if you're still trying to find a solution.

1: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/04/amazon-el...

That is great to know, thanks. It was pretty unusable the last time I tried it.
Also insanely expensive.

Do you know how much it costs to write 3 MB/second to EFS? How much does it cost to read 26 MB/second from the same EFS volume?

That's $1,400/month.

You should try one of the various netapp options. Marketplace but significantly better performance and a platform that’s got several decades of nas experience.

https://cloud.netapp.com/cloud-volumes-service-for-aws

Whether amazon will ever let you mount it to lambda is a very different discussion.

I found it adequate to work around limitations of another system I was using. We were using a container coordinator thing (Convox) that couldn't attach EBS volumes, nor could it limit concurrent access to exactly one replica. So I used EFS which worked OK. I kept an eye on how we were using the burst credits, and picked a filesystem size that gave us enough IOPS. All in all, it worked fine (but I was perfectly happy to move off of it to EBS, of course).