EFS: best practices and known issues

Best practices

• When to Choose Amazon EFS: aka EFS vs EBS vs S3
• Walkthrough: Create Writable Per-User Subdirectories

Known issues

Stack Fails creation when using EFS with head and compute subnets in different availability zones

Error

Affecting pcluster versions <= 2.5.1

If in your config you have enabled EFS and are using head and compute subnets that are in different availability zones:

[vpc diff]
vpc_id = vpc-01234567
master_subnet_id = subnet-0123abcd123 # in us-east-1a
compute_subnet_id = subnet-0123efg123 # in us-east-1b

[efs fs]
shared_dir = /efs

Stack creation will fail, this is because we are only creating EFS mount targets in the head node AZ and not creating a mount target in the compute AZ.

Fix

Fixed with 2.6.0. Please try to use head and compute subnet that are in the same AZ when using EFS for pcluster versions <= 2.5.1.