AWS launches service to help enterprises scale file systems

Dive Brief:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) made its Elastic File System available Tuesday to many customers.
AWS first announced EFS in April 2015, and has been beta testing it for almost 15 months.
EFS is limited, however. It’s currently available only for Linux and only in three of AWS’s 13 cloud regions.

Dive Insight:

EFS is noteworthy because it allows file systems to scale, which been difficult until now.

“There are a huge number of applications that were written for a file system as opposed to object storage,” Jerome Lecat, CEO of storage firm Scality told GeekWire. “The reality of today is file systems, and we need to be able to on-ramp those into modern storage technology.”

While object storage scales easily, it doesn’t offer the tracking and control capabilities file systems do.

Amazon said EFS makes it “simple to set up and scale file storage in the AWS cloud.”

The service is now available in the US East, US West and EU regions. AWS said it plans to expand to additional regions soon.