Deep Dive on Elastic File System - February 2017 AWS Online Tech Talks

© 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Edward Naim, Head of Product, Amazon EFS
Darryl Osborne, Storage Specialist Solutions Architect
David Green, Enterprise Solutions Architect
February 23rd, 2017
Deep Dive on Amazon EFS

Learn why and when to use Amazon EFS
Understand key technical & security concepts
Discover how to leverage EFS’s performance
See EFS in action: Hands-on demos
Review EFS’s economics
Answer your questions (Q&A)
What to expect from this webinar

Cloud Data Migration
Direct
Connect
Snow* data
transport
family
3rd Party
Connectors
Transfer
Acceleration
Storage
Gateway
Kinesis Firehose
AWS Storage Platform and SolutionsThe AWS Storage Portfolio
Object
Amazon GlacierAmazon S3
Block
Amazon EBS
(persistent)
Amazon EC2
Instance Store
(ephemeral)
File
Amazon EFS

Amazon EFS attributes
1) Standard file system interface & semantics
2) Shared storage
3) Highly available
4) Highly durable
5) Consistent, low latencies
6) Scalable (storage & throughput)
7) Elastic capacity
8) Fully managed

We focused on changing the game
Simple Elastic Scalable
1 2 3
Highly durable
Highly available

Amazon EFS is Simple
• Fully managed
- No hardware, network, file layer
- Create a scalable file system in seconds!
• Seamless integration with existing tools and apps
- NFS v4.1—widespread, open
- Standard file system access semantics
- Works with standard OS file system APIs
• Simple pricing = simple forecasting
1

Amazon EFS is Elastic
• File systems grow and shrink automatically as
you add and remove files
• No need to provision storage capacity or
performance
• You pay only for the storage space you use,
with no minimum fee
2

• File systems can grow to petabytes of
capacity
• Throughput scales automatically as file
systems grow
• Consistent low latencies regardless of file
system size
• Support for thousands of concurrent NFS
connections
Amazon EFS is Scalable
3

• Every file system object is redundantly
stored across multiple Availability Zones in a
Region
• Designed to sustain Availability Zone offline
conditions
• Superior to traditional NAS availability
models
• Appropriate for production/tier 0 applications
High Durability & High Availability

In which Regions can I use EFS today?
• US West (Oregon)
• US East (N. Virginia)
• US East (Ohio)
• EU (Ireland)
More coming soon!

Do you need an EFS file system?
If you have an application (EC2 or on-premises) or use
case that requires a file system AND
• Requires multi-attach OR
• GBs/s throughput OR
• Multi-AZ availability/durability OR
• Requires automatic scaling (grow/shrink) of storage

What customers are using EFS for today
Web serving Content management
Analytics
Media and Entertainment
workflows
Workflow management
Home directories
Container storage
Database backups

Understand Key Technical and
Security Concepts

What is a file system?
• The primary resource in EFS
• Where you store files and directories
• Can create 125 file systems per account

What is a mount target?
• To access your file system within
a VPC, you create mount targets
in the VPC
• A mount target is an NFS endpoint
that lives in your VPC
• A mount target has an IP address
and a DNS name you use in your
mount command
• A mount target is highly available
AVAILABILITY ZONE 1
REGION
AVAILABILITY ZONE 2
AVAILABILITY ZONE 3
VPC
EC2
EC2
EC2
EC2
Mount
target

How to access a file system from an instance
• You “mount” a file system on an Amazon EC2 instance (standard
command) — the file system appears like a local set of directories
and files
• An NFS v4.1 client is standard on Linux distributions
mount –t nfs4 –o nfsvers=4.1
[file system DNS name]:/
/[user’s target directory]

How does it all fit together?
AVAILABILITY ZONE 1
REGION
AVAILABILITY ZONE 2
AVAILABILITY ZONE 3
VPC
EC2
EC2
EC2
EC2
File system
Data can be accessed from any AZ in the Region while maintaining full consistency

Several security mechanisms
 Control network traffic to and from file systems (mount targets) by
using VPC security groups and network ACLs
 Control file and directory access by using POSIX permissions
 Control administrative access (API access) to file systems by
using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
 EFS supports action-level and resource-level permissions

Access your EFS file system via AWS Direct Connect
Direct Connect EFS in your Amazon VPCOn-premises servers

Direct Connect support addresses three of four
hybrid scenarios
Bursting
Migration
Tiering
Backup / DR

Learn How to Leverage EFS’s
Performance

Amazon EFS is designed for wide spectrum of
performance needs
High throughput and parallel I/O
Low latency and serial I/O
Genomics
Big data analytics
Scale-out jobs
Home directories
Content management
Web serving
Metadata-intensive
jobs

Choose the performance mode best suited to
your workload
Mode What’s it for? Advantages Tradeoffs When to use
General
purpose
(default)
Latency-sensitive
applications and
general-purpose
workloads
Lowest latencies
for file operations
Limit of 7,000 ops/sec Best choice for most
workloads
Max I/O Large-scale and data-
heavy applications
Virtually unlimited
ability to scale out
throughput/IOPS
Slightly higher
latencies
Consider if 10s (or
more) instances
access your file
system concurrently

Use the PercentIOLimit CloudWatch metric to determine
if you’re constrained by General Purpose mode

Amazon EFS has a distributed data storage design
EC2
EC2
…
EC2
EC2
…
EC2
EC2
…
• File systems distributed across
unconstrained number of servers
• Avoids bottlenecks/constraints of
traditional file servers
• Enables high levels of aggregate
IOPS/throughput
• Data also distributed across
Availability Zones (durability,
availability)

How to think about EFS perf relative to EBS
Amazon EFS Amazon EBS PIOPS
Performance
Per-operation
latency
Low, consistent Lowest, consistent
Throughput
scale
Multiple GBs per second Single GB per second
Characteristics
Data availability
/ durability
Stored redundantly across multiple AZs Stored redundantly in a single AZ
Access
1 to 1000s of EC2 instances, from
multiple AZs, concurrently
Single EC2 instance in a single AZ
Use cases
Big Data and analytics, media processing
workflows, content management, web
serving, home directories
Boot volumes, transactional and
NoSQL databases, data warehousing
& ETL

An implication of per-operation latency: I/O size
impacts throughput of serialized operations
4 KB 32 KB 256 KB 2 MB 16 MB
I/O size
Throughput

How to take advantage of EFS’s distributed architecture:
Parallelize
Parallelize via multiple threads and/or multiple instances
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160
IOPS
# of Total Threads
Aggregate IOPS of parallel writes using
10 m4.xlarge instances

Use CloudWatch for a number of views of file
system performance
DataReadIOBytes
DataWriteIOBytes
MetadataIOBytes
TotalIOBytes
Measure throughput (‘Sum’ of bytes divided by
seconds in time period) or ops/sec (‘Data
Samples’ divided by seconds in time period)
BurstCreditBalance Monitor your burst credit usage over time to
ensure sufficient throughput capacity
PermittedThroughput Compare to actual throughput to determine
whether you’re being constrained by the burst
model
ClientConnections View the number of clients connected to your
file system
PercentIOLimit Determine whether you’re being constrained by
General Purpose mode (PercentIOLimit at or
near 100%)

Recommended kernel version and NFS mount options
Kernel
version
 Use Linux kernel 4.0+ (e.g., Amazon Linux 2016.03.0, Ubuntu
15.10 or 16.04)
Mount
options
 Mount via NFSv4.1
 Specify 1MB read/write buffers (“rsize”/”wsize”)
 Ensure operations are asynchronous
Recommend the following mount options:
-o nfsvers=4.1,
rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,hard,
timeo=600,retrans=2,async

Transferring media assets to EFS
• Size ranges from a few GB to
100+GB per file
• Data sources:
• Amazon S3
• Amazon EBS

Transferring many small files to EFS
• Size ranges from 64K to 256K
• Data sources:
• Amazon S3
• Amazon EBS

GNU parallel
• Tool for executing jobs in parallel
• Similar to xargs
• Replace loops in shell scripts
• GNU parallel makes sure output
from the commands is the same
output as you would get if you had
run the commands sequentially
https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/
For people who live life in the parallel lane

Use parallel threads – GNU parallel
# Create destination directory tree from source
find . -type d -print0 | parallel -j $N_THREADS -0 "mkdir -p
${DST_DIR}/{}" > /dev/null 2>&1
# Copy files
find . ! ( -type d ) -print0 | parallel -j $N_THREADS -0 "cp -
f {} ${DST_DIR}/{}"

Monitoring performance
• Data-driven results
• Repeatable outcomes
• Optimize for costs

Benchmark different instance types
• Determine the optimal instance size
• What is best? T2, C3, C4, M3, M4,
R3, X?
• Transfer test set of 1000 small files
• Increase thread count from 1-1024
concurrent threads

Tools
• Command orchestration
• Instance configuration
• Log collection
• Visualization
• Instance performance

Small File Performance - Instance Family Test
~200 threads

c3.large – 5,342 files per minute @ 200 threads

Increase Instance Count
• Using optimal instance size
• c3.large
• Using optimal thread counts
• ~200 per instance
• Increase instance count
• 300 instances
• Optimize for costs
• EC2 Spot Market

Results
Small files – 300 instancesLarge files – 50 instances

Summary / tl;dr
• Parallelize everything
• Threads
• Instances
• Test, test, test
• Capture & analyze test data
• Less than $5/hr for 300 instances

See EFS in Action: Web Serving

Content Management & Web Serving
Web-based applications for creating
and managing website content.
wikis
blogs
discussion
boards

Free and open-source content management system hosted
on a web platform
Web software to create beautiful websites, blogs, or apps
“Free and priceless at the same time” – WordPress.org
CODE IS POETRY

27% of all websites (November 2016) – Web Technology Surveys
Easiest and most popular blogging system in use on the
Web – CMS Usage Statistics
Supporting more than 60 million websites – Forbes
WordPress is Popular

Available as..
• Managed Web Hosting Service
• Software package from WordPress.org installed on self-
provisioned web platform… like AWS
How are people running WordPress today?

Structured data
(Posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, etc.)
Amazon EFSUnstructured data
(directories, php files, config, themes, plugins, etc.)
Amazon RDS
Amazon EC2Web Server
(Amazon Linux, Apache, PHP, OPCache)

Reference Architecture https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
Coming Soon

Simple and predictable pricing
• With Amazon EFS, you pay only for the storage space you use
 No minimum commitments or up-front fees
 No need to provision storage in advance
 No other fees, charges, or billing dimensions
• EFS price: $0.30/GB-month (US Regions)
$0.33/GB-month (EU Ireland)

AVAILABILITY
ZONE 1
REGION
EC2
AVAILABILITY
ZONE 2
AVAILABILITY
ZONE 3
EC2
Compute nodes to
manage 3rd-party
file system layer
EBS
Replicated
storage volumes
EBS
Inter-AZ traffic for
replication
Typical multi-AZ file system setup without EFS
EC2
NFS client
accessing file
system
NFS

TCO example
Let’s say you need to store ~500 GB and require high availability and durability
Using a shared file layer on top of EBS, you might provision 600 GB (with ~85% utilization)
and fully replicate the data to a second Availability Zone for availability/durability
Example comparative cost:
Storage (2x 600 GB EBS gp2 volumes): $120 per month
Compute (2x m4.xlarge instances): $350 per month
Inter-AZ data transfer costs (est.): $129 per month
Total $599 per month
EFS cost is (500GB * $0.30/GB-month) = $150 per month, with no additional charges

Key Recommendations
• Test your application!
• Use General Purpose mode for lowest latency, Max-I/O for
scale-out
• Use Linux kernel version 4.0 or newer, mount via NFSv4.1
• To optimize, look for opportunities to:
• Aggregate I/O
• Perform async operations
• Parallelize (demo later)
• Cache (demo later)
• Don’t forget to check your burst credit earn/spend rate when
testing – ensure sufficient amount of storage

Coming Soon: Encryption of data at rest
• Integrated with AWS Key Management Service
• Encryption/decryption handled transparently
• No extra cost

Additional Resources
Amazon EFS Site
- https://aws.amazon.com/efs/
Amazon EFS User Guide
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/whatisefs.html
AWS 10-Minute Tutorials
- https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/
Reference Architecture - WordPress on EFS coming soon
- https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
qwikLABS
- https://aws.qwiklabs.com/
YouTube: Amazon Web Services Channel

Deep Dive on Elastic File System - February 2017 AWS Online Tech Talks

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Deep Dive on Elastic File System - February 2017 AWS Online Tech Talks