Setting up your own Elastic File System is as easy as it gets! You can start off by launching the Elastic File System dashboard from the AWS Management Console, or alternatively, by visiting the URL https://console.aws.amazon.com/efs/:

1. On the EFS landing page, select the option Create file system to get started.
2. In the Configure file system access page, you can start off by first selecting the VPC you want to associate the filesystem with. Remember, you can have multiple filesystems per VPC, however, they cannot be extended across regions:

3. With the VPC selected, the associated subnets will automatically populate themselves based on the Availability Zones that they are a part of in the Create mount targets section. Here, you can select the appropriate subset that you wish to associate with the Elastic File System, along with its corresponding security group. In my case, I've selected the individual public subnets from my VPC, as the WordPress application instances will be deployed here, and these instances will require access to the filesystem for storing the images and other content.
4. With the fields populated, select the Next Step option to proceed.

5. The next step is all about Configuring optional settings for your Elastic File System. Here, you can Add tags to describe your filesystem and select the appropriate Performance mode for the filesystem, based on your requirements. Today, EFS provides two modes: the General Purpose, which is ideal for running the majority of workloads, and a Max I/O mode, which is specifically designed for when your environment needs to scale to tens of thousands of EC2 instances, all connecting to this single filesystem itself. Max I/O mode provides much better performances compared to General Purpose, however, there is the chance of a slightly higher latency when handling file operations here.
6. The final option left is Enable encryption, which, if checked, will leverage a KMS key from your existing AWS account and encrypt all the data stored in the filesystem at rest:

7. Complete the EFS setup process by reviewing the configuration changes on the Review and create page, and finally, click on Create to enable the filesystem. This process takes a couple of minutes, but once completed, you will be shown the DNS name of your newly created filesystem. Make a note of this name as you will be required to reference it in our Elastic Beanstalk environment as well.

So far, so good! We have our production environment up and running on Elastic Beanstalk, and now we have created a simple yet powerful Elastic File System. In the next section, we will look at how you can integrate the two services for use by WordPress using Elastic Beanstalk's configuration files concept.