8 can’t-miss re:Invent 2020-2021 sessions with Amazon EFS

Put on your fuzzy slippers, and claim your executive seat at re:Invent 2020-2021 – your couch. That’s right; our cloud extravaganza is entirely virtual this year, with weeks of free learning, sharing, networking, and fun. If you haven’t registered yet, now is the time. Already registered? Build your agenda.

AWS Storage has big plans for you, starting with our leadership session – “Innovate faster with applications on AWS storage” – where you can learn what’s new in the rapidly changing world of storage.

In this blog, I share information to help you get the most out of our Amazon EFS re:Invent sessions. Whether you’re a developer, a storage or app administrator, a cloud architect, or a dedicated file nerd, we have something for everyone. But first, if you’re new to Amazon EFS, here’s a brief primer.

What is Amazon EFS?

Amazon EFS is a serverless, reliable, elastic file system for AWS compute services. It provides massively parallel access to thousands of EC2 instances, and it’s integrated with AWS compute services for deploying applications with containers and serverless. Amazon EFS is for file-based workloads that require low latency, like home directories, web serving, content management, and development tools, as well as scale-out workloads that require high throughput, like backup jobs, machine learning, and media workflows. Amazon EFS is elastic and cost-optimized. You pay only for the resources you use, and there is no minimum fee, and no setup charges, with an effective storage cost as low as $0.08/GB-month*.

8 can’t miss Amazon EFS re:Invent sessions:

In this section, I list out Amazon EFS re:Invent sessions and provide descriptions. They’re easy to find in the re:Invent session catalog, in the upper right of the page, find All Tracks, and choose Storage in the pull-down menu. All sessions will be available for on-demand viewing shortly after they’ve aired for the first time. Lastly, the initial broadcast for each session features a Q&A session.

STG-213: What’s new with Amazon EFS

DEC 8, 2020 | 2:30 PM – 3:00 PM EST
DEC 8, 2020 | 10:30 PM – 11:00 PM EST
DEC 9, 2020 | 6:30 AM – 7:00 AM EST

Featured speaker: Joe Travaglini, AWS Storage

In this session, learn about new Amazon EFS features including how you can now modernize your applications with persistent file storage for containers and serverless. These features can enable you to maximize your performance, get your file systems created faster, and lower your costs.

STG-306: Security best practices with Amazon EFS

Featured speaker: Vasily Pantyukhin, AWS Storage

Security is your first priority. In this session, learn best practices to improve the security of your file-based applications. Amazon EFS provides scalable, cloud-native file storage for your applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), AWS containers, and serverless, in addition to on-premises deployments. We’ll examine Amazon EFS security features, from data encryption to permissions and managing access with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and using Amazon EFS Access Points.

STG-307: Deep dive on Amazon EFS

DEC 16, 2020 | 2:15 PM – 2:45 PM EST
DEC 16, 2020 | 10:15 PM – 10:45 PM EST
DEC 17, 2020 | 6:15 AM – 6:45 AM EST

Featured speaker: Abrar Hussain, AWS Storage

In the session, learn about Amazon EFS and selecting applications and workloads that can benefit from Amazon EFS’s massive scale, features, and benefits. You’ll leave this session with important details about security, scale, performance, management, storage classes, and data lifecycle management.

STG-310: Modernize your applications with AWS Lambda and Amazon EFS

DEC 16, 2020 | 5:00 PM – 5:30 PM EST
DEC 17, 2020 | 1:00 AM – 1:30 AM EST
DEC 17, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 9:30 AM EST

Featured speakers: Will Ochandarena (AWS Storage) & Jeff Tougas (Senior Principal Software Engineer – Asurion)

Serverless computing enables you to be more agile while spending less time dealing with the security, scalability, and availability of your applications. At the same time, modern data-intensive applications require fast access to large volumes of shared data. In this session, you’ll learn about running large-scale, mission-critical, data-intensive applications with AWS Lambda and Amazon EFS. We’ll explore using Amazon EFS serverless storage to simplify the sharing of data that must persist beyond and between executions of Lambda functions.

We are excited to welcome Jeff Tougas, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Asurion, to discuss how Asurion’s ML inference infrastructure scales elastically with call volume using Amazon EFS. He will also discuss how Asurion reduced operational overhead by using Amazon EFS to give extended storage space to its machine learning functions running in AWS Lambda.

STG-311: Optimizing Amazon EFS for cost and performance, using best practices

DEC 17, 2020 | 10:15 AM – 10:45 AM EST
DEC 17, 2020 | 6:15 PM – 6:45 PM EST
DEC 18, 2020 | 2:15 AM – 2:45 AM EST

Featured speaker: Shawn Khan, AWS Storage

Amazon EFS brings simple, highly available, durable, elastic, cloud-native file storage to your applications. In this session, AWS experts share best practices to optimize costs and performance when accessing data from your Amazon EFS file system. We go into detail on storage classes, lifecycle management, performance modes, and how to get the most from Amazon EFS.

STG-312: Modernize your applications with containers using Amazon EFS

DEC 17, 2020 | 11:15 AM – 11:45 AM PST
DEC 17, 2020 | 8:45 PM – 9:15 PM EST
DEC 18, 2020 | 4:45 AM – 5:15 AM EST

Featured speaker: Will Ochandarena (AWS Storage) & Jake Farrell (Senior Director of Engineering – Acquia)

Modernizing applications with containers improves agility, so you can innovate faster, while saving on infrastructure costs by improving utilization. In this session, we cover best practices for using fully managed Amazon EFS to share data between containers. We walk through how to get started with Amazon EFS for Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate. We discuss your implementation questions, and then we diagram different architectures and techniques to help you maximize your container deployments.

We are excited to welcome Amazon EFS customer Jake Farrell, Senior Director of Engineering at Acquia, to share how Acquia modernized its environment using EFS. Jake will talk about how Acquia has improved their customer experience by containerizing their hosting application using Amazon EKS and Amazon EFS.

STG-313: Reduce TCO for your Linux file-based applications

DEC 17, 2020 | 2:15 PM – 2:45 PM EST
DEC 17, 2020 | 10:15 PM – 10:45 PM EST
DEC 18, 2020 | 6:15 AM – 6:45 AM EST

Featured speaker: Sudhakar Mungamoori, AWS Storage

Managing on-premises legacy NAS storage arrays brings complexity and high sunk costs. Amazon EFS is a cloud-native, scalable, elastic NFS file system for Linux workloads for use with Amazon EC2, and AWS containers and serverless, in addition to on-premises deployments. In this session, learn about the latest features to optimize costs with your Linux file-based applications. We also discuss cost-saving scenarios for files accessed less frequently.

JAN 14, 2021 | 5:00 PM – 5:30 PM EST
JAN 15, 2021 | 1:00 AM – 1:30 AM EST
JAN 15, 2021 | 9:00 AM – 9:30 AM EST

Featured speaker: Geert Jansen, AWS Storage

Conclusion

While we may not be in Las Vegas this year, there is still so much to experience at re:Invent 2020-2021. From AWS keynotes to jams (hands-on immersive experiences) to AWS Late Night with music, special guests, a poker tournament, and more, there is no shortage of things to check out. Don’t forget to take a brain break, and play. Visit the re:Invent play page for fun and relaxation, like music, games, and even cooking instruction. AWS Community Hero guides (AWS Heroes are a group of worldwide, enthusiastic, AWS experts) provide ideas for what to see and do at re:Invent this year; including recommendations for Storage enthusiasts.

Our Amazon re:Invent session speakers look forward to sharing their knowledge, experience, and best practices with you. Get ready to modernize your applications, and simplify your file-based workloads with Amazon EFS. See you online at re:Invent.

*pricing in US East (N. Virginia) Region, assumes 80% of your storage in EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA)