Reduce Storage Costs with EFS

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Reduce Storage Costs with EFS

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, serverless elastic file system that lets you share file data without provisioning or managing storage. In this lab, we modify three existing EC2 instances to use a shared EFS storage volume instead of duplicated Elastic Block Store volumes. This reduces costs significantly, as we only need to store data in one location instead of three. By the end of this lab, you will understand how to create EFS volumes and attach them to an EC2 instance.

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Lab Info

Level

Beginner

Last updated

Sep 23, 2025

Duration

1h 0m

Challenge

Create an EFS File System

Create an EFS file system named 'SharedWeb' in the provided VPC.

Customize the storage class to 'One Zone' and leave the availability zone as 'us-east-1a'.

After creation, modify the security group of the file system to 'EC2SecurityGroup'.

Configure the inbound rules of the non-default security group in EC2 to allow NFS traffic from any source.
Challenge

Mount the EFS File System and Test It

Connect to the 'webserver-01' instance and create a directory '/efs'.

Mount the EFS file system to the '/efs' directory using the provided NFS command.

Verify the successful mount by checking the mounted file systems after a restart.

Move all files from '/data' to '/efs' using the 'rsync' command.

Verify the successful file transfer by listing the contents of '/efs'.
Challenge

Remove Old Data

Unmount the '/data' partition and modify the '/etc/fstab' file to replace the UUID line with the NFS mount point details.

Test the new mount point by unmounting '/efs' and using the 'mount -a' command.

Detach and delete the 10 GiB EBS volume attached to 'webserver-01' in the EC2 console.

Repeat the process of modifying the '/etc/fstab' file and testing the new mount point for 'webserver-02' and 'webserver-03'.

Detach and delete the 10 GiB EBS volumes attached to 'webserver-02' and 'webserver-03'.

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