LAUNCH, RUN, AND SCALE
FEATURE-RICH AND HIGHLY-PERFORMANT FILE SYSTEMS WITH AMAZON FSX
What is Amazon FSx?
Amazon FSx is a fully managed file system with fast performance and low latency. FSx enables organizations to deploy a file system without the need of having a dedicated file server, storage hardware, etc.
Fsx can be deployed either in a single availability zone or in multiple availability zones based on the requirement.
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server allows the deployment of file systems either in a single availability zone or in multiple availability zones, depending on the application’s needs. Some of the features of Amazon Fsx for windows include deduplication capability that can in turn reduce the storage cost, support for native windows OS, easy access with the on-premises environment, integration with other services like Amazon S3, Cloud watch, Cloud trail, etc.
Amazon FSx for Luster makes it easy and cost-effective to launch and run the world’s most popular high-performance file system. This is ideal for machine critical workloads such as High-Performance Computing (HPC), machine learning, etc.
FSx for luster allows workloads to process data with consistent sub-millisecond latencies, up to hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput, and up to millions of IOPS. FSx for luster is POSIX-compliant, and hence it can be easily integrated with Linux applications without any changes. It supports various deployment options for short-term and long-term data processing and seamlessly integrates with AWS S3, AWS EKS etc. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
Amazon FSx Features
Following are some of the features of Amazon FSx.
1. Directory Service Integration
FSx can be easily integrated with directory services such as Microsoft Active directory. This helps in seamless access of the file shares using the same domain credentials and also provides fine-grained access control using group policies.
We can integrate FSx with either a self-managed Active Directory or an AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory.
2. Security
Site to Site VPN can be used to encrypt data in transit between On-prem and AWS VPC. Data at rest can be encrypted using AWS KMS.
Standard windows ACL’s can be used for fine-grained file and folder access. FSx file systems automatically verify the credentials of users accessing file system data to enforce these Windows ACLs.
3. Less Administrative overhead
FSx can be deployed within a few clicks and we don’t have to worry about managing file servers and storage volumes, updating hardware, configuring software, running out of capacity, or tuning performance. All these tasks can be easily automated using FSx.
4. Multiple storage options
FSx for Lustre offers Solid-State Disk (SSD) and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) storage options to optimize cost and performance. For low-latency, IOPS-intensive workloads SSD storage would be the best choice. For throughput-intensive workloads, HDD storage can be used.
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Conclusion
This article describes briefly Amazon FSx and its features on a high level. Organizations can use this to deploy scalable and resilient file systems that can easily integrate with their on-premises environments and the AWS cloud.
Author
Simal Susan Isaac, StarOne IT Solutions