Amazon EFS Infrequent Access

EFS Intelligent-Tiering delivers automatic cost savings for workloads with changing access patterns by placing your file data in the appropriate storage class, at the right time, based on file access patterns.

EFS Lifecycle Management monitors your workload access patterns and automatically transition files that are not accessed for the duration of the lifecycle policy (e.g. 30 days) from the EFS Standard storage class to the Infrequent Access (IA) storage class. When you enable Intelligent-Tiering, if access patterns change and a file in EFS IA is read from or written to again, EFS will automatically moves that file back to EFS Standard, improving latency performance for subsequent access and eliminating the risk of unbounded access charges.

To use EFS Intelligent-Tiering, simply set a lifecycle policy to automatically move files back to EFS Standard if accessed.

EFS IA cost-effectively stores file data, with industry-leading availability, security and durability enabling you to meet regulatory retention and compliance needs so your backups are protected and available if needed.

Managing massive volumes of big data analytics can be costly and complex for workloads like genomics and geospatial applications. EFS IA cost-effectively stores large amounts of data while providing the same throughput used to scale applications with files stored in EFS Standard. If an analytics job is accessed later, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move this data to EFS Standard.

Many reporting systems for business applications rely on accessible shared file storage in support of business functions. With EFS IA, you can easily and cost-effectively store and access files from shared file systems, eliminating the need to manage data to control costs. If reports are accessed later, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move accessed reports to EFS Standard.

Web serving applications and content management systems store and serve media assets for websites, online publications, and archives. These assets become infrequently accessed after a period of time as content ages. You can easily store these infrequently accessed files in lower cost storage like EFS IA. If any of this content becomes active and is accessed once again, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move the accessed content to EFS Standard.

Data science workloads rely on shared file storage to store machine learning training data and inference models. As this data ages you can cost-effectively store it in EFS IA. If datasets become active once again, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move this data to EFS Standard. What these use cases have in common is they have unknown or changing access patterns. A low activity website becomes active once again, older reports in your document management system are referenced, or your machine learning inference datasets are re-used. Your data may be accessed from infrequent access storage classes (such as EFS IA). If this happens, EFS Intelligent-Tiering can automatically move files to the appropriate storage class, at the right time, based on file access patterns.