FSx for OpenZFS

AWS's fully managed file storage service built on the open-source OpenZFS file system, delivering sub-millisecond NFS latency with a rich set of ZFS data-management capabilities. Where EFS provides simple, automatically scaling NFS access for Linux workloads, FSx for OpenZFS adds ZFS-native features — instant point-in-time snapshots, space-efficient volume cloning, transparent data compression (LZ4 and ZSTD), and fine-grained quotas — without requiring you to manage the underlying ZFS infrastructure. Compared with FSx for NetApp ONTAP, which targets enterprise multi-protocol environments (NFS, SMB, iSCSI) with ONTAP-specific tooling, FSx for OpenZFS is NFS-only and focuses on familiar ZFS semantics, making it the natural landing zone for teams lifting on-premises ZFS workloads to AWS or building developer-facing infrastructure that benefits from fast cloning (e.g., spinning up per-developer or per-CI-job file-system copies in seconds). It deploys in Single-AZ or Multi-AZ configurations: Single-AZ offers the lowest latency and cost for workloads that tolerate a brief failover window, while Multi-AZ provides continuous availability with a standby file server in a second Availability Zone and automatic failover. Throughput can be provisioned independently of storage capacity, and the service integrates with AWS Backup for policy-driven, application-consistent backups. Snapshots are stored on the file system itself and can be exposed as read-only directories, making it straightforward for users to restore individual files without administrator involvement. Use FSx for OpenZFS when you need sub-millisecond NFS performance combined with ZFS data-management features, are migrating existing ZFS workloads to AWS, or want fast volume cloning for developer environments and CI/CD artifact caches; use EFS when you need a fully serverless NFS share that scales automatically without capacity planning; use FSx for NetApp ONTAP when you require multi-protocol access (NFS + SMB + iSCSI) or ONTAP-specific enterprise data management.

A software platform team replaces its on-premises ZFS NAS with FSx for OpenZFS to host shared build artifact caches across a fleet of EC2 CI runners. Each pull-request pipeline clones the base volume in under a second, runs a full build in the clone to avoid cache pollution between branches, and discards the clone on completion — providing complete build-cache isolation with no additional storage cost because clones share unchanged blocks with the parent volume.