What's the Difference Between Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx?
Compare Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx 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 EFS
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Amazon FSx
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Category
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Storage, File Storage |
Storage, File Storage |
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Description
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Serverless, fully elastic file storage |
Fully managed file storage built on popular file systems — Windows File Server, Lustre, NetApp ONTAP, and OpenZFS. |
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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 stored; no provisioning required |
Pay per GB provisioned + throughput |
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Free tier
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Yes |
No |
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Expert take
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“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.” |
“FSx for Lustre delivers hundreds of GB/s throughput for HPC and ML training workloads. FSx for Windows is the right choice when workloads need SMB protocol and Active Directory integration. Pick the file system type that matches your protocol and performance needs.” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon EFS or Amazon FSx
Use Amazon EFS when:
- Content management
- Web serving
- Home directories
- Machine learning
- Container storage
Use Amazon FSx when:
- Windows file shares
- HPC workloads
- Machine learning
- EDA
- Media processing
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