AWS Transfer Family Documentation

The AWS Transfer Family provides support for file transfers over SFTP, FTPS, and FTP directly into and out of Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon Elastic File System. AWS helps you migrate your file transfer workflows with AWS Transfer for SFTP, AWS Transfer for FTPS, and AWS Transfer for FTP by integrating with existing authentication systems so nothing changes for your customers, partners, and internal teams, or their applications.

AWS operates and manages the compute, storage, and other infrastructure necessary to maintain high availability and performance for your endpoint. Your endpoint is designed to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. You can get redundancy across multiple Availability Zones within an AWS Region.

The AWS Transfer Family can meet the needs of your dynamic workloads with elastic compute infrastructure. Built-in autoscaling is designed to help with provisioning additional resources if your data loads grow over time so you don’t have to worry if workloads spike during certain hours of the day or days of the month.

The AWS Transfer Family supports common user authentication systems, including Microsoft Active Directory and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Alternatively, you can also choose to store and manage users’ credentials directly within the service. By connecting your existing identity provider to the AWS Transfer Family service, the service is designed so your external users continue to have the correct level of access to your data resources without disruption.

AWS Transfer Family allows you to store the files you exchange as objects in your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon EFS file system so you can extract business insights faster. The key that makes this possible is that Transfer Family is designed to store your your data natively in Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS, while preserving relevant file metadata. For example, with your files stored in Amazon S3, you can use Amazon Translate to make process documents more tailored for international audiences. You can also use Amazon Comprehend to extract relationships and insights from text files, or you could even use Amazon Athena to query CSV files to analyze historical data. Similarly, with files in Amazon EFS, you can integrate your ERP system to access these files on arrival from your business partners.

An intuitive user interface and API allow you to configure your SFTP, FTPS, or FTP endpoint and set up client access. For external users, the service supports commonly used SFTP clients such as WinSCP, FileZilla, and scripts. Users don’t have to change their behavior to continue sharing data with you in the cloud.

With the AWS Transfer Family, you can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for security and identity management and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and event triggers to start post-upload processing. You can use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), Amazon S3 server-side encryption, or Customer Managed Keys with Amazon EFS to control encryption at rest. Additionally, AWS CloudTrail helps you meet compliance requirements with granular auditing of user and API activity.

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the AWS Customer Agreement available at http://aws.amazon.com/agreement, or other agreement between you and AWS governing your use of AWS’s services.