AWS has announced a major upgrade to its Elastic File System (EFS), achieving sub-millisecond speeds.

EFS is at the heart of the AWS platform, and is used in a wide array of applications. As a result, any increase in performance can result in significant quality-of-life improvements for AWS customers.

The latest announcement should be welcome to the company’s customers, with EFS now boasting sub-millisecond read latency.

“Up until today, EFS latency for read operations (both data and metadata) was typically in the low single-digit milliseconds,” writes Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS. “Effective today, new and existing EFS file systems now provide average latency as low as 600 microseconds for the majority of read operations on data and metadata.

“This performance boost applies to One Zone and Standard General Purpose EFS file systems. New or old, you will still get the same availability, durability, scalability, and strong read-after-write consistency that you have come to expect from EFS, at no additional cost and with no configuration changes.”

AWS began rolling the update out over the last few weeks, so some customers may already have noticed the speed boost.