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What's the Difference Between Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS?

Compare Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

Compare side-by-side

Comparisons
Amazon EBS
Amazon EFS
Category

Storage, Block Storage

Storage, File Storage
Description

High-performance block storage at any scale

Serverless, fully elastic file storage
Best for
  • Boot volumes
  • Databases
  • Enterprise applications
  • Throughput-intensive workloads
  • Content management
  • Web serving
  • Home directories
  • Machine learning
  • Container storage
Key features
  • SSD & HDD types
  • Snapshots
  • Encryption
  • Multi-attach
  • Elastic Volumes
  • Elastic scaling
  • Multi-AZ
  • Lifecycle management
  • NFS compatible
  • Throughput modes
Pricing model

Pay per GB provisioned per month + IOPS

Pay per GB stored; no provisioning required
Free tier

Yes

Yes
Expert take

“Choose gp3 for most general workloads since you get 3,000 IOPS baseline at a lower cost than gp2. For databases needing consistent sub-millisecond latency, io2 Block Express delivers up to 256,000 IOPS with 99.999% durability.”
— Oleksii Bebych, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“EFS is the answer when multiple EC2 instances or containers need concurrent read/write access to the same file system. It grows and shrinks automatically, so you never have to provision capacity or worry about running out of space.”
— Didier Durand, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]
Product page

Learn more about Amazon EBS »

Learn more about Amazon EFS »

When to use Amazon EBS or Amazon EFS

Use Amazon EBS when:

  • Boot volumes
  • Databases
  • Enterprise applications
  • Throughput-intensive workloads

Learn more about Amazon EBS »

Use Amazon EFS when:

  • Content management
  • Web serving
  • Home directories
  • Machine learning
  • Container storage

Learn more about Amazon EFS »

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