Mount EFS on Amazon Linux | Deepak's digital garden

So, you have created an EFS volume and now you want to mount it on your Amazon Linux instance. This tutorial will show you how to do that.

Prerequisites

Check if the EFS volume is created and available.

$ lsblk
NAME          MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1       259:0    0   20G  0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1   259:1    0   20G  0 part /
├─nvme0n1p127 259:2    0    1M  0 part
└─nvme0n1p128 259:3    0   10M  0 part
nvme1n1       259:4    0   20G  0 disk
├─nvme1n1p1   259:5    0 19.9G  0 part
├─nvme1n1p14  259:6    0    4M  0 part
└─nvme1n1p15  259:7    0  106M  0 part

We can notice that nvme1n1 is the EFS volume which has not been mounted yet.

We also need to know the device name of the EFS volume. We can get that from the AWS console.

In the above case it's /dev/sdf

Mounting the EFS volume

First, we need to create a directory where we want to mount the EFS volume.

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/data

Before we mount, we need to check if the EFS volume is correctly formatted. If not, we need to format it.

$ lsblk -f
NAME          FSTYPE FSVER LABEL           UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1
├─nvme0n1p1   xfs          /               0e39c519-1802-45f1-9bf8-61f5bbd358bd    1.7G    92% /
├─nvme0n1p127
└─nvme0n1p128 vfat   FAT16                 ECFE-5555
nvme1n1
├─nvme1n1p1   ext4   1.0   cloudimg-rootfs cda0c0a7-e64a-4413-85a5-a0235f6f567f
├─nvme1n1p14
└─nvme1n1p15  vfat   FAT32 UEFI            54D6-C8B8

We can see that its fstype is ext4, we will convert it to xfs in our case.

sudo mkfs -t xfs /dev/sdf

If the above command fails and ask for force, we can use the -f flag to force the format.

sudo mkfs -t xfs -f /dev/sdf

Now, mount the EFS volume to the directory we created earlier.

sudo mount /dev/sdf /mnt/data

Done!! Now, we can check if the EFS volume is mounted.

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        4.0M     0  4.0M   0% /dev
tmpfs           7.7G     0  7.7G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           3.1G  8.5M  3.1G   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p1   20G   19G  1.7G  92% /
tmpfs           7.7G     0  7.7G   0% /tmp
tmpfs           1.6G   28K  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/nvme1n1     20G  175M   20G   1% /mnt/data

We can see that the EFS volume is mounted to /mnt/data.

Note: if the mkfs fails saying mkfs.xfs not found
run sudo yum install xfsprogs and try again.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, please let me know.