Performance Comparison of AWS EBS, EFS and S3 for Enterprise Cloud-Storage Workloads

Abstract

Background: Enterprise workloads increasingly depend on cloud storage, yet Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) expose fundamentally different block, file, and object interfaces. Direct ranking by a single performance metric is therefore misleading.

Objective: To compare EBS, EFS, and S3 using workload-relevant dimensions including latency, I/O operations, throughput, concurrency, access semantics, and scalability, and to derive an evidence-based selection framework for enterprise deployments.

Methods: A structured review and technical evidence synthesis was performed using peer-reviewed cloud-storage benchmarking studies and authoritative AWS technical publications. Evidence was grouped by storage abstraction and by workload pattern, with emphasis on random transactional I/O, shared-file access, large-object transfer, and highly parallel analytics.

Results: EBS provides the strongest fit for latency-sensitive block workloads because performance is exposed through directly tunable IOPS and throughput; gp3 established a 3,000-IOPS and 125-MiB/s baseline with independent scaling to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MiB/s. EFS provides shared NFS semantics and scales aggregate access across many clients, but performance depends on metadata intensity, client concurrency, performance mode, and throughput configuration; service enhancements increased General Purpose read operations and per-client throughput, followed by a threefold increase in read throughput for read-heavy workloads. S3 provides the broadest horizontal scale for object workloads; request performance scales by prefix and parallelism, while object size, network path, and connection overhead strongly influence observed throughput. Strong read-after-write consistency removes an earlier application-level constraint without changing S3's object semantics.

Conclusion: No service is universally fastest. EBS is preferable for transaction-oriented and latency-critical block I/O, EFS for shared POSIX-like file access across concurrent compute nodes, and S3 for data lakes, backup, content distribution, and highly parallel large-object workloads. Enterprise architectures should benchmark the target access pattern and frequently combine all three services rather than selecting a single storage tier.