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Azure File Storage VS Amazon Elastic File System

Compare Azure File Storage VS Amazon Elastic File System and see what are their differences

Azure File Storage logo Azure File Storage

Try Azure File Storage for managed file shares that use standard SMB 3.0 protocol. Share data with on-premises and cloud servers, integrate with apps, and more.

Amazon Elastic File System logo Amazon Elastic File System

Amazon Elastic File System is a cloud-native and serverless data store that provides simple saleable elastic shared file storage for Linux-based business applications.
  • Azure File Storage Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-11
  • Amazon Elastic File System Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-05

Azure File Storage features and specs

  • Scalability
    Azure File Storage can seamlessly scale up to support your data storage needs without sacrificing performance, ensuring that businesses can grow without concerns about storage limitations.
  • Managed Service
    As a fully managed service, Azure takes care of the maintenance, updates, and infrastructure, reducing administrative overhead for IT teams, and allowing them to focus on other business-critical tasks.
  • Integration
    Azure File Storage integrates well with other Microsoft products such as Windows Server and other Azure services, enabling a cohesive and efficient ecosystem for consistent and smooth user experiences.
  • Access Control
    Provides robust access control through Azure Active Directory, setting up specific permissions, ensuring that data remains secure and only accessible to authorized users.
  • Cross-platform Access
    Supports the SMB protocol, allowing access from various operating systems including Windows, Linux, and macOS, enabling diverse environments to interact seamlessly with the storage service.

Possible disadvantages of Azure File Storage

  • Cost
    Costs can accumulate rapidly, especially in scenarios involving large volumes of data, frequent access, or high redundancy, potentially leading to substantial operational expenses.
  • Complex Pricing Model
    The pricing model can be complex with various tiers and charges based on operations, data redundancy, and outbound data transfer, making it difficult to predict the exact costs effectively.
  • Latency
    While generally fast, there can be latency issues, particularly in situations where files are accessed from regions that are geographically distant from the storage location, affecting performance.
  • Limited Customization
    Compared to on-premise solutions, there is limited capacity for customization of the infrastructure and may not meet specific needs of certain businesses that require tailor-made setups.
  • Dependency on Internet Connectivity
    Azure File Storage relies on stable internet connectivity, which can be a risk for businesses situated in areas with unstable networks or outages, impacting the ability to access data.

Amazon Elastic File System features and specs

  • Scalability
    Amazon EFS automatically scales your file system storage capacity up or down as you add or remove files, which helps meet varying workload demands without the need for manual intervention.
  • Managed Service
    As a fully managed service, Amazon EFS handles storage infrastructure management tasks such as hardware provisioning, patching, and performance tuning, enabling users to focus on application development.
  • Elasticity
    Amazon EFS provides elastic storage capacity, so you only pay for the storage you use, which can result in cost savings and greater efficiency compared to traditional file systems.
  • Multi-AZ Resilience
    Amazon EFS is designed to be highly-available and resilient with data redundantly stored across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring durability and availability of critical workloads.
  • POSIX-Compliant
    EFS offers a POSIX-compliant file system which makes it compatible with a wide range of legacy and modern applications, easing integration and migration processes.
  • Integration with AWS Services
    It seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as EC2, ECS, and Lambda, providing users with a cohesive and comprehensive cloud ecosystem for building and deploying applications.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon Elastic File System

  • Higher Latency
    Compared to other storage services like EBS, Amazon EFS might exhibit higher latency due to its network file system nature, potentially impacting performance-sensitive applications.
  • Cost
    Amazon EFS can be more expensive than alternatives like Amazon S3 or EBS, especially for workloads with lower IOPS requirements, due to its pricing model based on storage and access.
  • Consistency Model
    While EFS offers eventual consistency for write operations from multiple connections, this can lead to potential data visibility issues if not managed carefully in concurrent write scenarios.
  • Mount Targets Limitation
    Each Amazon EFS file system can have a limited number of mount targets per VPC, potentially restricting its usability for environments with a large number of instances across multiple subnets.
  • Limited Windows Support
    Amazon EFS is primarily designed for Linux-based workloads, which can pose challenges or require additional configurations when used with Windows-based applications.

Azure File Storage videos

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Amazon Elastic File System videos

AWS EFS Tutorial | Amazon Elastic File System | AWS Storage Services | AWS Training | Edureka

More videos:

  • Review - What's New with Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Azure File Storage and Amazon Elastic File System)
Cloud Storage
61 61%
39% 39
Project Management
65 65%
35% 35
Work Collaboration
67 67%
33% 33
FTP Client
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon Elastic File System should be more popular than Azure File Storage. It has been mentiond 25 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Azure File Storage mentions (14)

  • A Step by Step Guide on How to Migrate from AWS to Azure
    If your workloads require shared storage, Azure Files is a nice pick. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Searching for online alternative for a synology
    Azure Files perhaps? Or if you need frequently accessed files to be quicker then Azure File Sync. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How To Upload and Delete files in Azure Blob Storage Using Blazor Apps With .NET 7
    ​To know more details: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/storage/files/. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Hosted, mappable storage?
    If you have a use case that affords any kind of budget, maybe consder Azure Files. It is an SMB share you access over the internet. Basically, windows file server but hardened and entirely managed by Microsoft. This is as hands-off as it gets for an SMB share. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Microsoft cloud drive options
    I have a client that (finally!) decided to go all-in on Azure; I had prepared the owner to expect additional costs based on their need for a file share -- I was expecting to have to use Azure Files. Source: over 2 years ago
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Amazon Elastic File System mentions (25)

  • Get Started with Serverless Architectures: Top Tools You Need to Know
    AWS Lambda AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your backend code in response to events such as object uploads and HTTP requests. It automatically handles all the capacity, patching, scaling, and administration of the infrastructure to run your AWS Lambda functions. Lambda also provides visibility and performance and automatically manages the computing resources, making it easy to build applications that... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • ⚡🦀 Deploy a blazing-fast & Lightweight LLM app with Rust-Rig-LanceDB
    LanceDB's underlying optimized storage format, lance, is flexible enough to be supported by various storage backends, such as local NVMe, EBS, EFS, S3 and other third-party APIs that connect to the cloud. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Mount Up! A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating and Using Amazon EFS on Ubuntu
    Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provides a simple, scalable, and fully managed Network File System for use with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. This guide will walk you through the process of creating an EFS, mounting it on an Ubuntu instance, and adding files to it. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Mastering AWS: Deploying a Complex Three-Tier Architecture for Production
    AWS EFS is a managed shared storage solution in the cloud that is compatible with NFS. In our three-tier architecture, it sits in the data layer and provides shared storage for the application tier servers. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Building a Serverless AI Content Detector
    But that didn't work quite so well. Between some issues with the packages, and the amount of time it took to unzip... It just wasn't worth it. So I refactored back into using EFS to host the packages and model files. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Azure File Storage and Amazon Elastic File System, you can also consider the following products

Cyberduck - A libre FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3, Backblaze B2, Azure & OpenStack Swift browser.

Igloo Software - Igloo is a modern intranet, it connects people with the information they need to do their best work.

Google Cloud Filestore - Fully-managed cloud file storage

Google Cloud Resource Manager - Resource Manager provides methods that you can use to programmatically manage your projects on Google Cloud Platform.

WinSCP - WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows.

IBM Cloud File Storage - IBM Cloud File Storage is flash-backed, durable, fast, and flexible NFS-based file storage.