EFS performance is just horrible. Running containers on it is asking for problems.
My advice, stick to EC2 + EBS, it works.
Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
#22This is the single biggest blocker to running something like Postfix in ECS. This is a huge, huge win.
I think postfix would perform horrifically on EFS, which has absymal latency and is terrible for workloads with lots of random i/o.
Re: Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
#23This is great news! Yes, these containers are supposed to be stateless, but I was tasked with converting an app at my previous job over to using ECS on Fargate and we hit so many issues because of the limits on storage per container instance. We ended up having to tweak the heck out of nginx caching configurations and other processes that would generate any "on disk" files to get around the issues. Having EFS availab…
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/04/aws-farga... PV 1.4 comes with Single 20gb Volume.
Re: Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
#24How's the performance on EFS? Has anyone used it in production that is willing to share their experience? We evaluated it for a relatively simple use case, and the performance seemed abysmal, so we didn't select it. I'm hoping that we made a mistake in our evaluation protocol, which would give me an excuse to give it another try.
It's terrible. Very slow when we tried to use it. There are ways to work around this, and ways to tune the performance, but honestly it was not worth it for our use case and instead we found a way to make EBS work. EFS is a great way to get a lot of iowait on your cpu graphs. Would not recommend it for anything that had to be fast.
AWS just last week upped the read throughput speed on EFS pretty significantly (4x). That probably won't solve all of your speed problems and its still not as fast as EBS, but it might be worth giving it another try if your workload isn't write-heavy.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/04/amazon-el...
Re: Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
#25I see a lot of notes about EFS's performance in the comments. I figured it's at least worth noting, for anyone considering using ECS with EFS, that just last week EFS had its read throughput on its general purpose tier increased by 400%.
That probably won't solve all EFS performance issues, but it's a pretty big boost and a nice announcement to come alongside ECS support.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/04/amazon-el...
Re: Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
#26How's the performance on EFS? Has anyone used it in production that is willing to share their experience? We evaluated it for a relatively simple use case, and the performance seemed abysmal, so we didn't select it. I'm hoping that we made a mistake in our evaluation protocol, which would give me an excuse to give it another try.
For a high performance shared file system on AWS, an alternative is ObjectiveFS[0]. It uses memory caching to achieve performance closer to local disk.
Re: Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
#27Hope this is added to Lambda soon. EFS scalability would shine with Lambda.
Re: Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
#28This is the single biggest blocker to running something like Postfix in ECS. This is a huge, huge win.
I think postfix would perform horrifically on EFS, which has absymal latency and is terrible for workloads with lots of random i/o.
(One of the product managers on the Amazon EFS team here). We have many customers that use EFS for a wide variety of use cases, including hosting Postfix. As with all applications, performance needs are relative. Use EFS if your application requires consistent low single digit ms latencies, shared POSIX file system, and a pay as you go elastic usage model. As with all AWS services, EFS is always launching greater performance capabilities, including IOPS, throughput and lower latencies to meet the needs of our customers. As example, on 4/1, EFS launched a 400% improvement in read IOPS for its General Purpose performance mode, from 7,000 to 35,000. Given the type of file system operations that Postfix performs, it should nicely benefit from this improvement.
Re: Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's terrible. Very slow when we tried to use it. There are ways to work around this, and ways to tune the performance, but honestly it was not worth it for our use case and instead we found a way to make EBS work. EFS is a great way to get a lot of iowait on your cpu graphs. Would not recommend it for anything that had to be fast.
Would you recommend it for a CMS like system (Drupal) that's backed by a CDN?
(One of the product managers on the Amazon EFS team here). Drupal is a common application that customers use with EFS, both in combination with a CDN and without. The following are two important considerations when running Drupal on an NFS service like EFS:
i) You should configure the OPcache so that it does not revalidate its cache on every request. Cache validation uses stat() in a serial loop on potentially hundreds of files, where each stat() would add O(ms) to the request.
ii) We recommend you store log files locally. NFS does not define an atomic O_APPEND operation, so appends require a file lock to prevent interleaving with appends from other clients. I've seen PHP application do 100s of file locks to a log file per request, each adding O(ms) to the total request latency. This is what you'd like to avoid.
Re: Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems
#30This is great news! Yes, these containers are supposed to be stateless, but I was tasked with converting an app at my previous job over to using ECS on Fargate and we hit so many issues because of the limits on storage per container instance. We ended up having to tweak the heck out of nginx caching configurations and other processes that would generate any "on disk" files to get around the issues. Having EFS availab…
containers shouldn't necessarily be stateless; most existing codes don't know how or want to talk to services via RPC interfaces. In some sense, a mounted remote filesystem is just a standard API the OS provides you to access state in a convenient way that happens to be high performance, indexed, etc.
Yeah, I think they are conflating stateless and ephemeral in this case.