Amazon Elastic File System announces 400% increase in read operations for General Purpose mode file systems

Starting today, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) General Purpose mode file systems support up to 35,000 read operations per second, a 400% increase from the previous limit of 7,000. Maximum write operations are unchanged at 7,000 per second.

General Purpose mode (GP mode) is the default performance mode for Amazon EFS. It offers the lowest per-operation latency and is the recommended choice for most applications. Amazon EFS also offers the Max I/O performance mode which can scale to higher levels of aggregate throughput and supports over 500,000 operations per second with slightly higher metadata latencies than GP mode.

With this launch, customers benefit from increased performance for workloads that need the lower metadata latencies of GP mode but also require a higher number of read operations. For example, customers using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software can now host more application instances on a single file system, lowering cost and reducing operational complexity, while customers with CI/CD workloads can enjoy faster software builds, increasing developer productivity. Other use cases that benefit include web serving, document management, and Electronic Document Interchange (EDI).

All existing and new GP file systems automatically have the new read operations limit enabled at no additional cost and with no action required. The new limit is available in all regions where EFS is available. For additional details on how read and write operations contribute to total file operations, see the Amazon EFS documentation.