What's the Difference Between Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS?
Compare Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon EBS
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Amazon EFS
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Category
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Storage, Block Storage |
Storage, File Storage |
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Description
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High-performance block storage at any scale |
Serverless, fully elastic file storage |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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Pay per GB provisioned per month + IOPS |
Pay per GB stored; no provisioning required |
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Free tier
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Yes |
Yes |
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Expert take
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“Choose gp3 for most general workloads since you get 3,000 IOPS baseline at a lower cost than gp2. For databases needing consistent sub-millisecond latency, io2 Block Express delivers up to 256,000 IOPS with 99.999% durability.” |
“EFS is the answer when multiple EC2 instances or containers need concurrent read/write access to the same file system. It grows and shrinks automatically, so you never have to provision capacity or worry about running out of space.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon EBS or Amazon EFS
Use Amazon EBS when:
- Boot volumes
- Databases
- Enterprise applications
- Throughput-intensive workloads
Use Amazon EFS when:
- Content management
- Web serving
- Home directories
- Machine learning
- Container storage
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