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AWS Transfer Family

AWS Transfer Family features

Fully managed and highly available infrastructure

The AWS Transfer Family offers fully managed support for the transfer of files over SFTP, FTPS, FTP, and AS2 directly into and out of AWS Storage services. You can seamlessly migrate, automate, and monitor your file transfer workflows by maintaining existing client-side configurations for authentication, access, and firewalls — so nothing changes for your customers, partners, and internal teams, or their applications.

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

Features

Elastic resources

The AWS Transfer Family can meet the needs of your dynamic workloads with elastic compute infrastructure. Built-in autoscaling means that you never have to worry about provisioning additional resources if your data loads grow over time. You don't have to worry if workloads spike during certain hours of the day or days of the month.

Supports multiple user authentication methods

The AWS Transfer Family supports multiple authentication methods, including Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, and service-managed credentials, while also offering a modular custom identity provider solution. You can use this solution to implement custom authentication and authorization with granular per-user controls, separating authentication logic from session configuration to maintain security and flexibility.

Data stored natively in AWS Storage services

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 piece that makes this exchange possible is that AWS Transfer Family stores your data natively in S3 or 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 EFS, you can directly integrate your ERP system to access these files on arrival from your business partners.

Simple user experience

An intuitive user interface and API makes it simple for you to configure your SFTP, FTPS, FTP, or AS2 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. You can also setup connectors to access files stored on remote servers hosted by your business partners or your on-premise locations.

Familiar and comprehensive AWS management services

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. Use the Transfer Family Terraform module to integrate and automate the provisioning of Transfer Family resources and their associated AWS services, enabling infrastructure-as-code practice.