AWS launches new EFS storage class that cuts costs in half

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new storage class that’s designed for workloads that don’t require a high level of availability.

Unlike the standard Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), the newly introduced One Zone storage class will help users save costs if they are using AWS for use cases, such as for hosting development and build environments, which don’t need to bank upon standard EFS’ high-availability features.

“I am happy to announce Amazon EFS One Zone storage classes, reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes,” shared Channy Yun, a Principal Developer Advocate for AWS.

Costs benefits

Illustrating the need for the One Zone storage class, Yun explains that the new class is designed to help save costs for users that use AWS for applications such as analytics and simulation and media transcoding, which don’t require the highest levels of availability and durability offered by the standard EFS classes.

Yun illustrates the cost savings by sharing that the new One Zone storage class can reduce the price of cloud storage effectively to $0.043/GB-month for customers who have turned on EFS lifecycle management functionality and don’t access a bulk of their data frequently.

This makes the new storage class useful and cost effective for storing replicas, or backup copies of on-premises data. Yun suggests it’s also ideal for applications that have built-in replication and high-availability features and will allow customers of such apps to save on the costs of the standard EFS storage classes.

“We are launching two new single AZ storage classes, Amazon EFS One Zone – $0.16/GB-month in the case of the US East (N. Virginia) Region, and Amazon EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access (One Zone-IA) – $0.0133 GB-month in the case of the US East (N. Virginia) Region,” shares Yun adding that all file systems that use either of the One Zone storage classes are configured with an automatic backup policy via AWS Backup.

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With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.