Amazon has cut prices by 44 per cent for Elastic File System (EFS) when using Infrequent Access (IA) with Lifecycle Management.
Amazon EFS customers enable Lifecycle Management and any file not accessed after 14, 30, 60 or 90 days is automatically moved to the EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA) storage class. This enables customers to reduce storage costs by up to 92 per cent compared to EFS Standard storage class, which costs$0.30/GB/month.
When launched in February 2019 EFS IA cost $0.045/GB/month. It is now $0.025/GB/month. “This is one of the largest price drops in the history of AWS to date!” AWS technical evangelist Steve Roberts wrote in an official AWS blog.
He cited “Industry analysts such as IDC, and our own analysis of usage patterns confirms, that around 80 per cent of data is not accessed very often. The remaining 20 per cent is in active use.”
With that in mind here’s the blog’s pricing example looking at storage costs for 100TB of file data;
- 20 per cent of 100TB = 20TB at $0.30/GB-month = $0.30 x 20 x 1,000 = $6,000
- 80 per cent of 100TB = 80TB at $0.025/GB-month = $0.025 x 80 x 1,000 = $2,000
- Total for 100TB = $8,000/month or $0.08/GB-month. Remember, this price also includes (for free) multi-AZ, full elasticity, and strong file system consistency.
- Total for 100TB in EFS standard = $30,000/month, meaning a saving of $22,000/month.
EFS IA with Lifecycle Management moves files from EFS to EFS IA transparently to applications. The data remains accessible within the same file system namespace albeit with a slightly higher latency; double digit ms vs single digit ms, AWS says.
Blocks & Files understands AWS views competitors as not having the capability of such a low-cost tier.
