Amazon Elastic File System: Building Blocks for a Cloud-Native File System

Amazon Elastic File System is a scalable, elastic, and cloud-native NFS file system. This talk will describe the block layer within EFS and why we incorporated concurrency primitives into the interface that upper layers use to construct files and directories. The block layer presents a logical namespace that lets callers use a simple transactional interface that hides topics such as consensus, replication, recovery, and most types of coordination. Customer applications require a wide variety of latency and throughput combinations. Creating one fully distributed and one concentrated implementation of the same EFS block interface allows us to support two different performance profiles on the same underlying storage.

Learning Objectives

Relationships between scaling, performance dimensions and layering design,Application of consensus and erasure coding to distributed block storage,Optimistic concurrency control in distributed file systems