2 min

AWS has lowered the prices of its Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) service considerably. For some customers, the costs are as much as 92 percent lower. The company itself is talking about the biggest price drop in its history.

Amazon EFS is the fully managed and cloud-native NFS file system for Linux workloads. The service offers elastic storage. This means that customers’ file systems automatically grow and shrink when files are added or deleted.

AWS senior technical evangelist Steve Roberts argues that two main reasons to move applications to the cloud are to maximize operational efficiency and to lower the total cost of ownership. This also applies to storage costs.

According to Roberts, from now on users can store files native in a file system and access them for only 8 cents (7 eurocents) per gigabyte, per month. That’s what Silicon Angle reports.

Lifecycle Management

As a result, Amazon is lowering the prices associated with its EFS Lifecycle Management service. Lifecycle Management responds to the fact that not all data is often used. According to research by IDC and AWS itself, for example, it appears that 80 percent of the data is not often used, and only 20 percent is actively used.

If Lifecycle Management is enabled on a file system, it selects files that are not used often enough according to a user’s lifecycle policy. The files are then moved to the more cost-efficient EFS Infrequent Access.

The less used data in EFS Infrequent Access is still directly accessible to users. However, the difference with the standard EFS service is that there is a slightly higher operational latency.

EFS Infrequent Access appeared earlier this year for 45 cents per GB per month. That price is now reduced to 25 cents (23 euro cents) per GB per month.