EFS price based on giga bytes:

Question

Hi,   
  
I was studying EFS pricing based on : https://aws.amazon.com/efs/pricing/  
  
Suppose I am using standard storage and using EFS as a "process intermediate place".  That is, suppose we have 1000GB going through EFS per day but each file stay not for long.  Maybe couple of seconds to at most an hour and they will be deleted.  Do these 1000GB consider as storage per month and we will be charged for 0.30 * 1000 = 300 per day?  
  
Since we are copying files to EFS, using lambda to process the files, maybe we should use infrequent access access model where we are charged for 0.01 per Gbyte transferred and 0.025 per GB accessed which means 0.035 per GB (including transferred to the EFS from S3, processing them)?   That will be every day. 1000 GB * 0.035 = 35.00.  Am I thinking it right?      
  
According to throughput, we want to move files fast from S3 to EFS (each file 400Mbyte - 50 GB), process them and then move they maybe to glacier.  If we use the bursting mode, will we have enough bursting credit due to the nature size of the file?  Or provision speed would be better?  
  
Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Answer

1000 GB stored in EFS standard storage for 1 hour per day would equal 31,000 GB-Hours/month (1000 GB x 31 days x 1 hour) . The total monthly standard storage charge would be $12.50. (31,000 GB-Hours x (1 month / 744 hours) x $0.30/GB-month).   
  
Infrequent access (IA) does not make sense for the use case you described where files are stored on EFS for less than an hour per day. Files that are not accessed for a minimum of 7 days can be moved from EFS standard to EFS IA.  
  
With Bursting Throughput mode, throughput on Amazon EFS scales as a file system stored in the standard storage class grows.  File systems over 1 TiB in the standard storage class can burst to 100 MiB/s per TiB of data stored in the file system. Alternatively, you may provision throughput up to 1 GiB.  
  
Edited by: morschm on Jul 29, 2020 3:53 PM  
  
Edited by: morschm on Jul 29, 2020 4:01 PM  
  
Edited by: morschm on Jul 29, 2020 4:07 PM

Answer

The storage amount billed in a month is based on the **average** storage space used throughout the month. Your storage usage is measured in "GB-Month," which are added up at the end of the month to generate your monthly charges.   
  
I believe that if you are using a rolling 1000GB per day (ie, adding files and deleting files along the way to stay around 1000GB all the time), you would be billed for 1000GB.  So, as far as I know, your assumption there is correct.  
  
To back this up, we have a similar EFS volume that varies between 400-800GB because it keeps a rolling X days of data and my monthly bill shows about 600GB billed at .30 or $180.  So it definitely an average amount that you have used over the month.  
  
As for IA, I think things can get to IA based on time only (ie, not touched for X days, moves to IA).  Not sure if that model works for you.  
  
As far as burst credits go, I would watch the performance and Burst credit balance.  With 1TB it should be able to brust 50% of the time per https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/performance.html.  If you need more non-burst performance, you can artificially increase the size of the EFS volume to increase the speed after burst is exhausted.  
  
Edited by: smaybs on Jul 29, 2020 2:40 PM  
  
Edited by: smaybs on Jul 29, 2020 2:48 PM

EFS price based on giga bytes:

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