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Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems

by ifcologne on 4/8/20, 9:06 PM with 30 comments

• by txcwpalpha on 4/9/20, 1:06 AM

  I see a lot of notes about EFS's performance in the comments. I figured it's at least worth noting, for anyone considering using ECS with EFS, that just last week EFS had its read throughput on its general purpose tier increased by 400%.

  That probably won't solve all EFS performance issues, but it's a pretty big boost and a nice announcement to come alongside ECS support.

  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/04/amazon-el...

• by finaliteration on 4/8/20, 9:45 PM

  This is great news!

  Yes, these containers are supposed to be stateless, but I was tasked with converting an app at my previous job over to using ECS on Fargate and we hit so many issues because of the limits on storage per container instance. We ended up having to tweak the heck out of nginx caching configurations and other processes that would generate any "on disk" files to get around the issues. Having EFS available would have made solving some of those problems so much easier.

  I've also been wanting to use ECS on Fargate for running scheduled tasks with large files (50gb+) but it wasn't really possible given the previous 4gb limit on storage.

• by jboggan on 4/8/20, 10:52 PM

  Oh man, awesome. We had a rather janky workload where ECS would spin up an EC2 that would then mount an EFS volume and then write a file over to S3. This is going to make that so much easier and cleaner.

  If you're wondering why you'd ever have to do something like that, the answer is SAP.

• by koolba on 4/8/20, 10:06 PM

  This is going to make a lot of container workloads that were possible, but inconvenient to setup, suddenly trivial to deploy. Very nice!

• by mark242 on 4/8/20, 9:52 PM

  This is the single biggest blocker to running something like Postfix in ECS. This is a huge, huge win.

• by zapita on 4/8/20, 10:09 PM

  How's the performance on EFS? Has anyone used it in production that is willing to share their experience?

  We evaluated it for a relatively simple use case, and the performance seemed abysmal, so we didn't select it. I'm hoping that we made a mistake in our evaluation protocol, which would give me an excuse to give it another try.

• by geerlingguy on 4/8/20, 10:24 PM

  Technically it supported it before, but you had to configure everything manually (or with your own automation). Having it native is a lot nicer, and brings provisioning of NFS-style volumes up to par with the current Kubernetes experience.

• by WatchDog on 4/8/20, 10:45 PM

  This is going to make running teamcity or jenkins from fargate, much simpler.

• by rkwasny on 4/8/20, 11:28 PM

  EFS performance is just horrible. Running containers on it is asking for problems.

  My advice, stick to EC2 + EBS, it works.

• by djstein on 4/8/20, 9:43 PM

  FINALLY!!! edit: thanks a lot ECS team

• by nnx on 4/9/20, 2:10 AM

  Hope this is added to Lambda soon. EFS scalability would shine with Lambda.