Comparison based on Characteristics

Storage Type

EBS(elastic block storage) & EFS(elastic file system), as the name suggests EBS is block-level storage and EFS is file-level storage.

Availability

As we know that EBS is directly attached to the instance so there is no sign of the term availability in it whereas Amazon EFS is highly durable and highly available storage.

Durability

EBS is similar to hard disks but the only difference is that EBS is connected to virtual EC2 instances and it offers 20 times more reliability than normal hard disks.

EFS is highly durable storage.

Performance

EBS offers a Baseline performance of 3 IOPS per GB for General Purpose volume and also we can use Provisioned IOPS for increased performance whereas EFS supports up to 7000 file system operations per second.

Data Stored

The data stored in EBS remains in the same availability zone and multiple replicas are created within the same availability zone whereas in EFS the data stored remains in the same region and multiple replicas are created within the same region.

Comprehensive managed service

EFS is a completely managed service, which means that your firm will never have to patch, deploy, or maintain your file system, but the same is not the case with EBS.

Data Access

One most important disadvantage of EBS is that it cannot be accessed directly via the internet, it can only be accessed by a single EC2 instance with whom it is connected, whereas EFS storage allows access of 1 to 1000s of EC2 instances concurrently via the internet but these instances must be present in the same region only.

Encryption

Both EBS and EFS supports encryption and uses an AWS KMS–Managed Customer Master Key (CMK) and AES 256-bit Encryption standards for encryption.

File Size Limitation

As EBS is directly connected to the EC2 instance so we have don’t have any limitation on file size whereas in EFS the maximum size of a single file can be up to 47.9TiB.

Cost savings

EFS is the only storage in which you’ll pay for is exactly what you use, as there’s no advance provisioning, up-front fees, or commitments whereas in EBS you need to attach a fixed amount of volume, and you are charged for the same.

The AWS EFS(Elastic file system) and AWS EBS(Elastic block storage) are two different types of storage services provided by Amazon Web Services. This article highlights some major differences between Amazon EFS and Amazon EBS.