[EFS] Anybody aware of plans to remove EFS's min file size requirement for transition to IA?

Question

Hi!

Our EFS storage is comprised mostly of small files, many of which are lower than the [128 KB minimum requirement](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/lifecycle-management-efs.html#metadata) to be transitioned to Infrequent Access storage. As a consequence, we're partially excluded from the cost savings that Intelligent Tiering brings to many other users.

AWS regularly improves EFS though, with for instance [1-Day Lifecycle Management Policy](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/elastic-file-system-1-day-lifecycle-management-policy-reduce-costs-cold-data-sets/) released a few months ago. Similarly, in 2021 AWS [removed the 128 KB requirement for S3's Intelligent Tiering](https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/09/s3-efs-intelligent-tiering/).

We are wondering if AWS has perhaps plans to remove that requirement at some point for EFS as well. Has anybody heard anything about that? If not, is there a recommended way for us to suggest that improvement to them?

Answer

Any information on that?

Answer

It looks like the policy has changed on November 26, 2023. From https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/metered-sizes.html:

> Support for files smaller than 128 KiB is only available for lifecycle policies updated on or after 12:00 PM PT, November 26, 2023.

That's a wonderful improvement, thanks AWS!

On a side note though it would have been nice to be notified of this change. We had our bursting EFS suddenly slow down drastically due to it having consumed all of its credits since with this change our multi TB EFS is now almost entirely in IA storage class. Took some time to understand what was happening and why.

[EFS] Anybody aware of plans to remove EFS's min file size requirement for transition to IA?

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