Working with Amazon EFS resources
Amazon EFS provides elastic, shared file storage that is POSIX-compliant. The file system that you create supports concurrent read and write access from multiple Amazon EC2 instances. The file system is also accessible from all of the Availability Zones in the AWS Region where it is created.
You can mount an Amazon EFS file system on EC2 instances in your virtual private cloud (VPC) based on Amazon VPC by using the Network File System versions 4.0 and 4.1 protocol (NFSv4). For more information, see How Amazon EFS works.
As an example, suppose that you have one or more EC2 instances launched in your VPC. Now you want to create and use a file system on these instances. Following are the typical steps that you must perform to use Amazon EFS file systems in the VPC:
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Create an Amazon EFS file system – When creating a file system, we recommend using the Name tag. The Name tag value appears in the console and makes it easier to identify the file system. You can also add other optional tags to the file system.
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Create mount targets for the file system – To access the file system in your VPC and mount the file system to your Amazon EC2 instance, you must create mount targets in the VPC subnets.
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Create security groups – Both an Amazon EC2 instance and a mount target must have associated security groups. These security groups act as a virtual firewall that controls the traffic between them. You can use the security group that you associated with the mount target to control inbound traffic to your file system. To do this, add an inbound rule to the mount target security group that allows access from a specific EC2 instance. Then, you can mount the file system only on that EC2 instance.
Topics
Resource IDs
Amazon EFS assigns unique resource identifiers (IDs) to all EFS resources when they are created. All EFS resource IDs consist of a resource identifier and a combination of digits 0–9 and lowercase letters a–f.
Before October 2021, the IDs assigned to newly created file system and mount target
resources used 8 characters after the hyphen (for example, fs-12345678). From May
2021 to October 2021, we changed the IDs of these resource types to use 17 characters after
the hyphen (for example, fs-1234567890abcdef0). Depending on when your account
was created, you might have file system and mount target resources with short IDs, though any
new resources of these types receive the longer IDs. The Resource ID
never changes.
Creation token and idempotency
Idempotency ensures that an API request completes only once. With idempotent requests, if the original request completes successfully, subsequent requests have no additional effect. This is useful to prevent duplicate jobs from being created when you interact with the Amazon EFS API.
The Amazon EFS API supports idempotency with client request tokens. A client request token is a unique string that you specify when you make a create job request.
A client request token can be any string that includes up to 64 ASCII characters. If you reuse a client request token within one minute of a successful request, the API returns the job details of the original request.
If you use the console, it generates the token for you. If you use the Custom Create flow in the console, the creation token that is generated for you has the following format:
"CreationToken": "console-d215fa78-1f83-4651-b026-facafd8a7da7"
If you use Quick Create to create a file system with the service recommended settings, the creation token has the following format:
"CreationToken": "quickCreated-d7f56c5f-e433-41ca-8307-9d9c0f8a77a2"
