Amazon Web Services – Introduction to Amazon FSx

In this article, we will look into Amazon’s fully managed native File Server service called Amazon FSx, and it is integrated with the rest of AWS. So what does fully managed mean? It means that you no longer need to manage the hardware or the software to provide File server services to your users. AWS takes care of managing the hardware in terms of setting up the hardware and the servers and the volumes and you no longer need to monitor and maintain them in terms of hardware failures.

AWS also manages the software in terms of setting up the servers and also patching and maintaining the servers themselves and backing them up. The AWS FSx helps us to launch and run high-performance file systems with just a few clicks while avoiding tasks like provisioning hardware, configuring software or taking backups. Amazon FSx helps you to grasp the rich feature sets and fast performance of the most commonly used open-source and expensive file systems.

Features of Amazon FSx:

The following image depicts the benefits of Amazon Fsx:

Benefits of FSx

1. Simple and fully managed: Helps in fast and easy launching of the fully managed, highly reliable file system. After getting  Amazon FSx file systems, you need not think about handling file servers and storage volumes, renovate hardware, build software, monitoring storage consumption, or performing backups — all these time taking administration tasks to automate by Amazon FSx.
2. Highly available and durable: Amazon FSx provides a variety of deployment options to match your workload’s availability and durability requirement. FSx for Windows File Server, helps you to choose from single-AZ or multi-AZ deployment types, based on the needs of the application. FSx for Lustre, helps you to choose from scratch or persistent storage for short-term or long-term data processing.
3. Secure and complaint: Amazon FSx automatically encrypts your data-at-rest and in-transit. In order to control network access to user file system, It allows user to run their file systems in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). It meets the highest security standards and has been assessed to comply with ISO, PCI-DSS, and SOC certifications, and is HIPAA eligible. FSx integration with AWS Backup provides user data protection requirements with centralized backup and compliance management for their Amazon FSx file systems.
4. Fast delivery: Amazon FSx file systems are designed to deliver fast, predictable, scalable, and consistent performance. It provides you with high read and write speed and consistent low latency data access. It makes you choose the storage type and increase storage capacity at any time according to your needs.
5. Pay only for used resources: It offers a wide range of SSD and HDD storage options which in turn helps you to optimize storage price and performance for your workload. Here data compression helps to reduce storage consumption of user file system storage and user file system backups. In order to optimize cost  Amazon FSx for Windows File Server removes redundant data. While FSx for Lustre helps you to select unreplicated, scratch file systems to further reduce costs for small-time processing of data.
6. Easy integration with other AWS services: In order to easily develop, deploy, and run your workloads FSx can be integrated with other AWS services such as S3, CloudWatch, CloudTail, AWS KMS etc. Amazon FSx file systems can be integrated with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudTrail, AWS KMS, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon AppStream 2.0, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), AWS Batch, and AWS ParallelCluster.

Setting up Amazon FSx:

Follow the below steps to setup Amazon FSx:

Step 1: Open your AWS management console -> click on Services ->Amazon FSx->Click on the Create file system.

Amazon FSx

Step 2: Select Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Step 3: Give File system name -> deployment type -> storage type and capacity->provide directory.

Set up Amazon FSx for Windows File Server

Step 4: Click next, your file system is created(you can do settings accordingly as per your need).

Amazon FSx is successfully set up

AWS FSx provides two file systems to choose from : 

1. Amazon FSx for Windows file server for enterprise workload :

Amazon FSx for Windows file server is a native Microsoft Windows file system so that you can move your windows-based apps to this shared storage in AWS. Built on a Windows server, it has great compatibility with Microsoft products. It will also give you full support for the SMB protocol, Windows NTFS, and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) integration. Also, FSx uses SSD for fast performance. With FSx for Windows File Server, you can choose from single-AZ or multi-AZ deployment types, depending on your application’s needs.

Features  of AWS FSx for window s file server

2. Amazon FSx for Lustre :

FSx for lustre makes it very easy to launch and run the world’s most popular file system. With FSx for Lustre, you can choose from scratch or persistent storage for short-term or long-term data processing. The Lustre file system is an open-source, parallel file system that supports many requirements of leadership class HPC(High-Performance Computing) simulation environment. You can integrate it with S3 which makes it easier to process data sets. When linked with S3, luster shows all S3 objects as files and any change made will reflect in the S3 bucket too.

Features of Amazon FSx  for Lustre