Enabling automatic mounting on new EC2 Linux instances - Amazon Elastic File System

Enabling automatic mounting on new EC2 Linux instances

When you create a new Amazon EC2 Linux instance using the EC2 Launch Instance Wizard, you can configure it to mount your Amazon EFS file system automatically. The EC2 instance mounts the file system automatically the instance first launched and also whenever it restarts.

This method uses the EFS mount helper to mount the file system update the /etc/fstab file on the EC2 instance. The mount helper is part of the amazon-efs-utils set of tools.

Note

Amazon EFS file systems do not support mounting on Amazon EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur or Monterey at instance launch.

Note

You can't use Amazon EFS with Microsoft Windows–based Amazon EC2 instances.

Before you can launch and connect to an Amazon EC2 instance, you need to create a key pair. For more information, see Amazon EC2 key pairs and Amazon EC2 instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide to create a key pair.

To configure your EC2 instance to mount an EFS file system automatically at launch

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. Choose Launch Instance.

  3. In Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), find an Amazon Linux AMI at the top of the list and choose Select.

  4. In Step 2: Choose an Instance Type, choose Next: Configure Instance Details.

  5. In Step 3: Configure Instance Details, provide the following information:

    • For Network, choose the entry for the same VPC that the EFS file system you're mounting is in.

    • For Subnet, choose a default subnet in any Availability Zone.

    • For File systems, choose the EFS file system that you want to mount. The path shown next the file system ID is the mount point that the EC2 instance will use, which you can change.

    • Under Advanced Details, the User data is automatically generated, and includes the commands needed to mount the EFS file systems you specified under File systems.

  6. Choose Next: Add Storage.

  7. Choose Next: Add Tags.

  8. Name your instance and choose Next: Configure Security Group.

  9. In Step 6: Configure Security Group, set Assign a security group to Select an existing security group. Choose the default security group to make sure that it can access your EFS file system.

    You can't access your EC2 instance by Secure Shell (SSH) using this security group. For access by SSH, later you can edit the default security and add a rule to allow SSH or a new security group that allows SSH. You can use the following settings:

    • Type: SSH

    • Protocol: TCP

    • Port Range: 22

    • Source: Anywhere 0.0.0.0/0

  10. Choose Review and Launch.

  11. Choose Launch.

  12. Select the check box for the key pair that you created, and then choose Launch Instances.

Your EC2 instance is now configured to mount the EFS file system at launch and whenever it's rebooted.