Support for AWS EFS?

[mbo77]

I'm a bit puzzled about the status of support for NFS repositories based on AWS EFS.
It looks like in general it works fine as a NFS 4.1 share on the VBR server, but I wasn't able to find information on this matter.

Is there someone actively using EFS as an NFS share?

[veremin]

Before we start discussing particular scenarios, can you tell me whether there any particular reason to use EFS over EBS for backup repository? I'm wondering cause the latter provides better backup performance and does not require any specific configuration or workaround. Thanks!

[mbo77]

EFS is only used for configuration backups, not for the productive backups. Those backups are directed to EBS/S3.
With EFS it's rather easy to deploy a minimal setup and access the configuration backups in case of a disaster and other backups means of the server itself failed.

[mbo77]

Any feedback on this?

[Gostev]

As long as it is a normal NFS 4.1 share, I don't see any issues of using it as a backup repository. While I definitely don't know many customers doing so at this time, I find this solution very creative as it seems like a perfect target for configuration backup specifically. Plus honesty, I trust NFS share on AWS more than on some low-end NAS (in terms of data integrity). Thanks!

[mbo77]

OK, then I will need to raise a ticket with it.
Because I see some erratic pattern of this share being not available after some time. And I can't pin down the problem. I know that AWS EFS doesn't provide any portmapper with his service, but modern NFS implementations don't rely on it, at least to my knowledge.

[veremin]

We didn't dig deeper into this issue, cause we didn't think about EFS as decent backup target (performance-wise), but our preliminary tests showed that there might be some problems with EFS not returning version through RPC service (as most clients normally do) and our NFS client failing because of that.

You can still investigate your particular case with the support team, but be aware of some expected limitations above.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Well, if it's not "normal" NFS share then I take everything I said back