AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner / EC2 Instance Storage

Amazon FSx Overview

🔹 What Is Amazon FSx?

When EFS or S3 don't fit your needs, Amazon FSx gives you fully managed, high-performance third-party file systems on AWS.

Two flavors matter for the exam:

  • 🪟 FSx for Windows File Server

  • ⚡ FSx for Lustre


🪟 FSx for Windows File Server

A fully managed, Windows-native shared file system.

Key features:

  • Built on Windows File Server

  • Multi-AZ deployment for high reliability

  • Supports Windows protocols — SMB and NTFS

  • Integrates with Microsoft Active Directory

  • Accessible from Windows EC2 instances and on-prem Windows clients

Use case: Extend your corporate Windows file server setup into AWS seamlessly.

📌 Exam cue: Windows workloads, SMB, NTFS, AD integration.


⚡ FSx for Lustre

A fully managed, high-performance file system for HPC workloads.

"Lustre" = Linux + Cluster — built for distributed computing.

Key features:

  • Massive scale: hundreds of GB/s throughput, millions of IOPS, sub-millisecond latency

  • Built for HPC use cases — machine learning, analytics, video processing, financial modeling

  • Connects to both corporate data centers and AWS compute

  • Can use Amazon S3 as backend storage

Use case: Training ML models or processing huge datasets fast.

📌 Exam cue: HPC, Linux clusters, high-speed storage.


📊 Quick Comparison

FSx Flavor

Purpose

Protocols / Integration

Best For

🪟 Windows File Server

Windows-native file sharing

SMB, NTFS, Active Directory

Corporate Windows workloads

⚡ Lustre

High-performance computing

Linux clusters, S3 backend

ML, analytics, HPC


🎯 Exam Tip

  • FSx = managed — AWS handles the infrastructure, you just use the file system

  • 🪟 Windows → SMB/NTFS/AD

  • ⚡ Lustre → HPC/Linux/throughput