AWS, for one, has really put in a lot of innovation and effort to come up with some really awesome services, and one such service that I personally feel has tremendous potential is the Elastic File System. Why is it so important? Well, to answer this question, we need to take a small step back and understand what type of storage services AWS offers at the moment.

First up, we have the object stores in the form of Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Although virtually infinite in scaling capacity, both these services are known to be a tad slower performance-wise compared to the EC2 instance storage and the EBS. This is bound to happen, as the likes of EBS is specially designed to provide fast and durable block storage, but, as a trade-off, you cannot extend an EBS volume across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic File System or EFS, on the other hand, provides a mix of both worlds by giving you the performance of an EBS volume combined with the availability of the same volume across multiple AZs, and that is really awesome! To summarize, EFS is a massively scalable file storage system that allows you to mount multiple EC2 instances to it simultaneously across AZs, without having to worry about the durability, availability, or performance of the system.

How does EFS actually work, you ask? Well, that's exactly what we will learn about in the next section.