- Allows us to launch 3rd party high-performance file systems on AWS
- Useful when we don't want to use an AWS managed file system like S3
- Can be accessed from your on-premise infrastructure
FSx for Windows​
- Shared File System for Windows (like EFS but for Windows)
- Supports SMB protocol, Windows NTFS, Microsoft Active Directory integration, ACLs, user quotas
- Built on SSD, scale up to 10s of GB/s, millions of IOPS, 100s PB of data
- Supports Multi-AZ (high availability)
- Data is backed-up daily to S3
- Does not integrate with S3 (cannot store cold data)
FSx for Lustre​
- Parallel distributed file system for HPC (like EFS but for HPC)
- Scales up to 100s GB/s, millions of IOPS, sub-ms latencies
- Only works with Linux
- Seamless integration with S3
- Can read S3 buckets as a file system (through FSx)
- Can write the output back to S3 (through FSx)
- Ability to both process the hot data in a parallel and distributed fashion as well as easily store the cold data on Amazon S3
FSx Deployment Options​
- Scratch File System
- Temporary storage (cheaper)
- Data is not replicated (data lost if the file server fails)
- High burst (6x faster than persistent file system)
- Usage: short-term processing
- Persistent File System
- Long-term storage (expensive)
- Data is replicated within same AZ
- Failed files are replaced within minutes
- Usage: long-term processing, sensitive data