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DenisM

Salient points:

- NFS (v4).

- Supports petabyte-scale file systems, thousands of concurrent NFS connections.

- Automatically grows/shrinks in size.

- Multi-zone storage and access.

- $0.30 / (Gigabyte * month).

- (Not mentioned) Both Linux and Windows have built-in NFS clients.

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For comparison, EBS is $0.10 / GB / Month for SSDs and $0.05 / GB / Month for regular disks.

But this is EBS + redundant NFS-mountable server, which is at least worth 2 EC2 instances as well as 2 x the EBS cost, which makes the equivalent ~$100 per month (m3.mediums) plus $0.20/GB/month for SSDs.

For comparison, keep in mind that EBS is $0.10/Gb per provisioned storage, which is often over-provisioned. Versus EFS $0.30/Gb per utilized storage.

> - (Not mentioned) Both Linux and Windows have built-in NFS clients.

Does anyone use the NFS for Windows? Is it reliable enough I can move servers away from CIFS alogether if I want to access a Linux box from Windows. For instance if I click the folder's Properties in Windows, will I see the proper Unix perms and metadata and be able to edit them?

FYI: In windows (desktop versions) it's only now in the "Enterprise" version, and apparently will be removed in Windows 10. Not sure if there are limitations to which server versions are currently supported.

CIFS/SAMBA in Linux has been pretty good, imho for the past couple years... though I still get some occasional wonky behavior from my NAS box.

Where have you heard that they are removing the NFS client in Win10?

I have read this as well, and to my experience, it really isn't available in my windows 10 preview vm.

Thanks for the time-saving description. Osx also has a built-in NFS client.

Until Amazon starts offering EC2 OS X instances, I'm not sure that's as relevant.

I think it means you can mount an EFS instance on OS X

Yes, but NFS over the Internet may not be fast enough to be usable.

Back in olden times Linux installation floppies provided the option of installing from an NFS share.

We used to do it over 10Base-T, which is slower than a lot of residential connections now. Well, latency will be higher over the internet, but bandwidth will be ok.

That's the whole point. Since NFS is such a round-trip oriented protocol, it's very sensitive to latency. You'll never fill up the bandwidth unless you do large bulk transfers in parallel.

But you can only use efs with ec2, which doesn't support osx.

No, it doesn't. From the announcement:

"Only Amazon EC2 instances within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) you specify can directly access your Amazon EFS file systems."

I assume Amazon can't offer EC2 OS X instances until Apple allows OS X to be virtualized

FYI OS X can be virtualized, but only run on Apple hardware. VMware have some details on the other caveats here -> http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?langua...

Unfortunately it's fairly flaky release to release.

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