Save around 47% of storage cost using AWS One Zone EFS Storage
Selecting right service for your cloud requirement can save huge money when using to cloud platforms. If cloud environment is not designed wisely it can cause a big hole in customer pocket. There are always multiple ways to achieve your goal in Cloud platform.
In this article I will discuss about how you can save around 47% of total cost while selecting storage class for your load and application in AWS Cloud.
What is AWS Storage classes
AWS provide various storage classes to select from for your requirement. Well-known AWS storage classes are EBS, S3 and EFS
EBS and EFS are storage are optimized to be used with EC2 Instances. These can be mounted to Instances as a common data store to be used by multiple applications running on multiple instances. Data remains saved in these storage even if you kill your instances. EBS provides high performance being a form of block storage where as EFS is file storage highly optimized for use with EC2 Instances.
S3 being a object storage class can also be used by various other cloud services like cloud front, lambda along with its use with applications running on ec2 instances.
AWS EFS Storage Class
AWS EFS storage class provides high performance and dynamic scalability for storage required. It automatically scales up or down as per requirement and can be accessed simultaneously by multiple applications running on EC2 Instances and also can be shared with lambda or other cloud or on premises services. It is the storage class which offer pay as you go model means you pay only for the amount of space you use for your load.
Let us focus on EFS storage class options and how you can save cost, selecting One Zone EFS over Regional Zone EFS
AWS EFS provides two options to create your file system
- Regional
- One Zone
There is huge cost difference between One Zone and standard zones storage option in AWS Storage class.
To understand this you need to understand clearly how one zone and standard zone option of EFS storage works. Then you need to understand how these options are charged and lastly analyzing your load requirement.
Lets see these one by one
a) Difference between One Zone and Standard Option in EFS
In Regional storage class, data is stored redundantly across multiple availability zone where as in case of One Zone storage, data is stored redundantly within one availability zone only. In both the cases, up to thousands of compute instances from multiple availability zones can connect to file system. Both options give same options for backup and life cycle management of data. Data throughput options are same in both the cases. Data durability also is not different. Both storage class provide 11 9’s of durability and 3 9’s availability SLA.
b) Cost difference between One Zone and regional zone option in EFS
AWS claims that using one zone storage class can bring down total cost to 47% when best practice is used. As per best practice researches, 20% of data are frequently used whereas 80% of data is used infrequently. If appropriate life cycle management is used, one zone storage cost could be 47% less when compared with regional storage class.
There is also per GB cost difference in both storage classes as indicated below
One Zone Storage Class | Regional Storage class | |
Data Storage (GB-Month) | $0.16 | $0.30 |
Infrequent Access Storage (GB-Month) | $0.0133 | $0.025 |
Infrequent access Requests (per GB transferred) | $0.01 | $0.01 |
c) Use Cases
One Zone storage classes are ideal for workloads such as development, build, and staging environments, and applications such as analytics and simulation and media transcoding which don’t require the highest levels of availability and durability of Amazon EFS Standard storage classes. They are also ideal for storing replicas, secondary copies of on-premises data, data that can be easily recreated, and for applications with built-in replication and high-availability features that do not need to rely on the multi-AZ resilience of Amazon EFS Standard storage classes.
Regional storage class is useful for Big data and analytics, media processing workflows, content management, web serving, and home directories where you need higher level of redundancy across multiple availability zones
Creating EFS file system
To create your Amazon EFS file system
- Open the Amazon EFS Management Console.
- Choose Create file systemto open the Create file system dialog box.
