A Guide for Amazon EFS Mounting on AWS Cross Account

Overview

Moving to cloud helps companies to optimize the IT cost and ability to get rid of most of hardware and software. Also Storing data locally is riskier and maintaining the scalability is bit complex and challenging. So, Amazon came up with Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a simple, serverless, set-and-forget file system and overcoming security challenges. There is no additional and complex setup or minimum cost. You only need to pay for the storage you use, for reading and writing access to data stored in Infrequent Access storage classes, and any assigned throughput. 

In this blog, we’ll go through the fundamentals of Amazon EFS, steps and deep dive into Amazon EFS Mounting on AWS Cross Account. 

Introduction

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a serverless, fully elastic file storage. You can share file data using Amazon EFS without provisioning or managing storage capacity and performance. It grows and shrinks automatically as you add or remove files from it.

Prerequisites

Two AWS Accounts (Source/Destination)

Steps to Configure Amazon EFS

1. Log in to your AWS Account
2. Go to the Amazon EFS console, click Create file system, and then click Customize to add more details.
3. Fill in the relevant information under customize section below:

• Name: Appropriate Name for Amazon EFS
• Storage Class: Standard/One Zone
• Automated Backups: Enable/Disable
• Lifecycle Management: Moving files to save pricing
• Encryption: Enable/ Disable using KMS
• Performance settings: Select throughput mode

4. After that, click Next at last, and under Network Access Section, select the Amazon VPC. Under the Mount Targets tab, select the appropriate security group with an NFS port open for destination/source CIDR.

5. Now check if any File System Policy is required. Otherwise, click Next, review the list’s settings, and click.

Steps to Create Amazon VPC Peering

1. After creating Amazon EFS, configure Amazon VPC peering between the source and destination network in another region.
2. Go to the Amazon VPC console, and from the left hand side, select Perring connections and click Create peering connection.

• Name: Suitable name for the connection
• Select Source VPC
• Select another VPC to peer with: select Another account and provide the Account ID of the destination account.
• Region: select the appropriate Region with Accepter VPC ID

3. After filling in the above relevant information in the last click on Create peering connection

4. Once Amazon VPC peering is done successfully, go to the Route table of the source/destination route table and add the route with the target as the newly created peering connection above.

Steps for Amazon EFS Mounting

1. Next, go to the Amazon EFS console, and under the newly created Amazon EFS and click on Attach and select Mount via IP
2. After that, copy the command available under Using the NFS client section
3. And now, go to the Amazon EC2 instance in another region and create a directory using “mkdir efs” command and execute the command copied in the previous step.

4. Now you have successfully mounted the Amazon EFS cross-region, and you can test it by putting the files under the efs folder and using “df -hT”

Conclusion

In this blog, we’ve learned about Amazon EFS, when to use Amazon EFS, and some of the benefits and use cases of Amazon EFS. Amazon EFS file system throughput scales automatically as capacity grows. Amazon EFS is well suited to support many use cases, from home directories to business-critical applications. Use cases include storage for serverless and containerized applications, web serving big, data analytics and content management, application development and testing, media and entertainment workflows, and database backups.

Drop a query if you have any questions regarding Amazon EFS and we will get back to you quickly.

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