Overview - Amazon Elastic File System
Supported distributions
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Overview

The Amazon EFS client (amazon-efs-utils) is an open-source collection of Amazon EFS tools. There's no additional cost to use the Amazon EFS client, which you can download from GitHub here: https://github.com/aws/efs-utils.

The amazon-efs-utils package comes pre-installed on Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), Amazon Linux 2 (AL2), and Amazon Linux (AL1) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). The package is available in the Amazon Linux package repositories, and you can build and install the package on other Linux distributions. You can also use Amazon Systems Manager to automatically install or update the package. For more information, see Using Amazon Systems Manager to automatically install or update Amazon EFS client.

Note

The Amazon Linux (AL1) AMI reached its end-of-life on December 31, 2023 and is not supported for amazon-efs-utils packages released in April 2024 and later (version 2.0 and later). We recommend that you upgrade applications to Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), which includes long-term support until 2028.

The Amazon EFS client includes a mount helper and tooling that makes it easier to perform encryption of data in transit for Amazon EFS file systems. A mount helper is a program that you use when you mount a specific type of file system. We recommend that you use the mount helper included with the Amazon EFS client to mount your Amazon EFS file systems. Using the Amazon EFS client simplifies mounting EFS file systems, and can provide improved file system performance. For more information about using the EFS client and mount helper, see Mounting EFS file systems.

The following dependencies exist for amazon-efs-utils and are installed when you install the amazon-efs-utils package:

  • NFS client

    • nfs-utils for RHEL, CentOS, Amazon Linux, and Fedora distributions

    • nfs-common for Debian and Ubuntu distributions

  • Network relay (stunnel package, version 4.56 or later)

  • Python (version 3.4 or later)

  • OpenSSL 1.0.2 or newer

Note

By default, when using the Amazon EFS mount helper with Transport Layer Security (TLS), the mount helper enforces certificate hostname checking. The Amazon EFS mount helper mount helper uses the stunnel program for its TLS functionality. Some versions of Linux don't include a version of stunnel that supports these TLS features by default. When using one of those Linux versions, mounting an Amazon EFS file system using TLS fails.

When you've installed the amazon-efs-utils package, to upgrade your system's version of stunnel, see Upgrading stunnel.

You can use Amazon Systems Manager to manage Amazon EFS clients and automate the tasks required to install or update the amazon-efs-utils package on your EC2 instances. For more information, see Using Amazon Systems Manager to automatically install or update Amazon EFS client.

For issues with encryption, see Troubleshooting encryption.

Supported distributions

The Amazon EFS client has been verified against the following Linux and Mac distributions:

DistributionPackage typeinit system
Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) rpm systemd
Amazon Linux 2 (AL2)rpmsystemd
CentOS 7, 8rpmsystemd
Amazon Linux (AL1) 2017.09
Note

Amazon Linux (AL1) AMI reached its end-of-life on December 31, 2023 and is not supported for amazon-efs-utils packages released in April 2024 or later (version 2.0 and later).

rpm upstart
Debian 9, 10debsystemd
Fedora 28 - 32rpmsystemd
macOS Big Surlaunchd
macOS Montereylaunchd
macOS Ventura launchd
OpenSUSE Leap, Tumbleweedrpmsystemd
Oracle8 rpm systemd
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, 8, 9rpmsystemd
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12, 15rpmsystemd
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTSdebsystemd

For a complete list of supported distributions that the package has been verified against, see the amazon-efs-utils README on Github.