After more than a year of testing and tweaking, Amazon Inc. is finally making its Elastic File System (EFS) generally available. The service is designed to provide an easy-to-use storage backend for the growing number of on-premise workloads that organizations are migrating to AWS.

More specifically, Amazon built EFS to provide interoperability with traditional network-attached storage environments, which are file-oriented and handle access requests using the NFS protocol. They’re also typically optimized to provide a high degree of fault-tolerance, a trait that the service replicates as well. It creates multiple copies of every user record and distributes them across multiple AWS data centers to ensure that no information is lost in the event of anoutage. Administrators can customize the number of clones that are created based on their organization’s’ reliability requirements.

Most other maintenance tasks are handled automatically by EFC. Like Amazon’s other cloud storage services, the system can quickly allocate or deallocate capacity as the amount of data in a deployment changes. The company says that it’s capable of scaling to upwards of a petabyte and support thousands of concurrent clients. The functionality lends itself not only to legacy NAS applications but also certain cloud-native services that require a similar combination of ease-of-use and elasticity.

Atlassian Inc., for instance, runs several of its managed developer tools on EFC, including the hugely popular JIRA issue tracking platform. And Arcesium LLC, a trade automation specialist, uses the service to store and analyze records from its managed asset management platform. Amazon also sees the file system coming handy for powering content management systems, busy online publications and a wide range of other data-intensive workloads.

Thanks to EFC, AWS now supports all three of the most common storage types that are used by modern organizations. The service joins the object-oriented S3, the Amazon Elastic Block Store and Glacier, an archiving system designed to hold onto infrequently-accessed records for extended periods of time. All four are priced on an hourly basis.

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