During the AWS Summit in San Francisco on April 9, Andy Jessy, Senior Vice President of Amazon Web Services, announced a new service that will further widen the gap between AWS’s leadership and that of all other providers.

AWS Elastic File System

EFS is simply NFSv4—Network File System version 4—used to share files across various EC2 instances. It may seem simple, but implementing it in a multi-tenant environment—scalable in terms of storage space, throughput, and both upload and download speeds—while adhering to the principles of the cloud computing paradigm—well, it’s not actually that simple after all.

If we also consider that it’s seamlessly integrated with all other AWS services—including the critically important IAM (Identity and Access Management)—and that it’s highly reliable because data is replicated across multiple AZs (Availability Zones), then we can appreciate the high level of professionalism behind such a seemingly simple service.

Let’s also add the cost, which is truly negligible: $0.30/GB-month

Just think how many AWS customers—and how many Solution Architects and consultants working for those customers—have, out of necessity, had to configure an NFS on an EC2 instance to share data and files with multiple EC2 instances, perhaps autoscaling web servers. By “out of necessity,” we mean that it might not have been cost-effective to modify the underlying software to use AWS S3.

So now system administrators, consultants, and solution architects will be able to replace their current solutions (NFS on EC2—a single point of failure) with this scalable, high-performance, reliable, and more cost-effective alternative.

When you consider that the smallest EC2 instance (t2.micro) costs about $9.36/month, plus storage space at about $0.10 per GB-month, you’ll see that the savings and benefits are significant.

As cloud computing historians—and for the record—we must point out, however, that AWS is not the first to create a multi-tenant NFS as an on-demand service; the very first provider was Nirvanix, which went bankrupt in October 2013. However, another provider offered NFS cloud storage among its services: GoGrid, which was acquired by Datapipe in January 2015.

What will happen now to all those NFS solutions available on the AWS Marketplace?

And what opportunities might arise for players like Scality—who were our sponsors at the 2010 Cloud Camp—who could perhaps ride the wave of demand from AWS’s competing providers, who will want to quickly add a similar service to their on-demand offerings?