Amazon EBS vs. EFS: Choosing the Right Storage Solution for Your AWS Workloads

When building applications in AWS, selecting the right storage solution is crucial to optimizing performance, availability, and cost. Two of the most common storage services in AWS are Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). Both offer unique benefits and are designed for different types of workloads, but understanding their differences can help you make the right choice for your needs.

In this article, we’ll compare EBS and EFS, highlighting their key features, use cases, and pricing considerations to help you decide which storage solution is best for your AWS environment.

Amazon EBS: Block Storage for Single Instance Use

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides high-performance block storage that can be attached to a single EC2 instance at a time. It’s ideal for use cases where you need persistent, low-latency storage that can be tightly coupled with a specific instance, such as databases, application servers, and high-throughput transactional systems.

Key Features of Amazon EBS

1. Single Instance Access: Each EBS volume is typically tied to a single EC2 instance, with the exception of Multi-Attach volumes (io1/io2), which can be attached to up to 16 instances for read/write operations. For most EBS volumes, the instance and the volume must be in the same Availability Zone (AZ).
2. AZ-Locked: EBS volumes are tied to the Availability Zone where they were created. To move an EBS volume to another AZ, you must take a snapshot of the volume, and then restore the snapshot to create a new volume in the target AZ.
3. EBS Volume Types:

• gp2 (General Purpose SSD): Performance improves with disk size, meaning the larger the disk, the higher the IOPS (input/output operations per second).
• gp3 and io1: These volume types allow you to scale IOPS independently of volume size, providing more flexibility for performance tuning.

4. Backups and Snapshots: EBS volumes can be backed up by taking snapshots, but it’s important to note that backups consume IOPS and can impact performance if done during periods of…