What is Amazon Transfer Family? - Amazon Transfer Family
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What is Amazon Transfer Family?

Amazon Transfer Family is a secure transfer service that enables you to transfer files into and out of Amazon storage services. Transfer Family is part of the Amazon Web Services Cloud platform. Amazon Transfer Family offers fully managed support for the transfer of files over SFTP, AS2, FTPS, and FTP directly into and out of Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS. 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.

See Getting started with Amazon to learn more and to start building cloud applications with Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Transfer Family supports transferring data from or to the following Amazon storage services.

Amazon Transfer Family supports transferring data over the following protocols:

  • Secure Shell (SSH) File Transfer Protocol (SFTP): version 3

  • File Transfer Protocol Secure (FTPS)

  • File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

  • Applicability Statement 2 (AS2)

Note

For FTP and FTPS data connections, the port range that Transfer Family uses to establish the data channel is 8192–8200.

File transfer protocols are used in data exchange workflows across different industries such as financial services, healthcare, advertising, and retail, among others. Transfer Family simplifies the migration of file transfer workflows to Amazon.

The following are some common use cases for using Transfer Family with Amazon S3:

  • Data lakes in Amazon for uploads from third parties such as vendors and partners.

  • Subscription-based data distribution with your customers.

  • Internal transfers within your organization.

The following are some common use cases for using Transfer Family with Amazon EFS:

  • Data distribution

  • Supply chain

  • Content management

  • Web serving applications

The following are some common use cases for using Transfer Family with AS2:

  • Workflows with compliance requirements that rely on having data protection and security features built into the protocol

  • Supply chain logistics

  • Payments workflows

  • Business-to-business (B2B) transactions

  • Integrations with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems

With Transfer Family, you get access to a file transfer protocol-enabled server in Amazon without the need to run any server infrastructure. You can use this service to migrate your file transfer-based workflows to Amazon while maintaining your end users' clients and configurations as is. You first associate your hostname with the server endpoint, then add your users and provision them with the right level of access. After you do this, your users' transfer requests are serviced directly out of your Transfer Family server endpoint.

Transfer Family provides the following benefits:

  • A fully managed service that scales in real time to meet your needs.

  • You don't need to modify your applications or run any file transfer protocol infrastructure.

  • With your data in durable Amazon S3 storage, you can use native Amazon Web Services for processing, analytics, reporting, auditing, and archival functions.

  • With Amazon EFS as your data store, you get a fully managed elastic file system for use with Amazon Web Services Cloud services and on-premises resources. Amazon EFS is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files. This helps eliminate the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth.

  • A fully managed, serverless File Transfer Workflow service that makes it easy to set up, run, automate, and monitor processing of files uploaded using Amazon Transfer Family.

  • There are no upfront costs, and you pay only for the use of the service.

In the following sections, you can find a description of the different features of Transfer Family, a getting started tutorial, detailed instructions on how to set up the different protocol enabled servers, how to use different types of identity providers, and the service's API reference.

To get started with Transfer Family, see the following:

How Amazon Transfer Family works

Amazon Transfer Family is a fully managed Amazon service that you can use to transfer files into and out of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage or Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems over the following protocols:

  • Secure Shell (SSH) File Transfer Protocol (SFTP): version 3

  • File Transfer Protocol Secure (FTPS)

  • File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

  • Applicability Statement 2 (AS2)

Amazon Transfer Family supports up to 3 Availability Zones and is backed by an auto scaling, redundant fleet for your connection and transfer requests. For an example on how to build for higher redundancy and minimize network latency by using Latency-based routing, see the blog post Minimize network latency with your Amazon transfer for SFTP servers.

Transfer Family Managed File Transfer Workflows (MFTW) is a fully managed, serverless File Transfer Workflow service that makes it easy to set up, run, automate, and monitor processing of files uploaded using Amazon Transfer Family. Customers can use MFTW to automate various processing steps such as copying, tagging, scanning, filtering, compressing/decompressing, and encrypting/decrypting the data that is transferred using Transfer Family. This provides end to end visibility for tracking and auditability. For more details, see Amazon Transfer Family managed workflows.

Amazon Transfer Family supports any standard file transfer protocol client. Some commonly used clients are the following:

  • OpenSSH – A Macintosh and Linux command line utility.

  • WinSCP – A Windows-only graphical client.

  • Cyberduck – A Linux, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows graphical client.

  • FileZilla – A Linux, Macintosh, and Windows graphical client.

Blog posts relevant for Transfer Family

The following table lists the blog posts that contain useful information for Transfer Family customers. The table is sorted in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent posts are at the beginning of the table.

Blog post title and link Date
How Transfer Family can help you build a secure, compliant managed file transfer solution January 3, 2024
Detect malware threats using Amazon Transfer Family July 20, 2023
Extending SAP workloads with Amazon Transfer Family July 13, 2023
Encrypt and decrypt files with PGP and Amazon Transfer Family June 21, 2023
Authenticating to Amazon Transfer Family with Azure Active Directory and Amazon Lambda December 15, 2022
Customize file delivery notifications using Amazon Transfer Family managed workflows October 14, 2022
Building a cloud-native file transfer platform using Amazon Transfer Family workflows January 5, 2022
Enabling user self-service key management with AAmazon Transfer Family and Amazon Lambda. December 17, 2021
Enhance data access control with Amazon Transfer Family and Amazon S3 October 5, 2021
Improve throughput for internet facing file transfers using Amazon Global Accelerator and Amazon Transfer Family services June 7, 2021
Securing Amazon Transfer Family with Amazon Web Application Firewall and Amazon API Gateway May 5, 2021
Securing Amazon Transfer Family with Amazon Web Application Firewall and Amazon API Gateway January 15, 2021
Amazon Transfer Family support for Amazon Elastic File System January 7, 2021
Enable password authentication for Amazon Transfer Family using Amazon Secrets Manager November 5, 2020
Centralize data access using Amazon Transfer Family and Amazon Storage Gateway June 22, 2020
Using Amazon EFS for Amazon Lambda in your serverless applications June 18, 2020
Use IP allow list to secure your Amazon Transfer Family servers April 8, 2020
Minimize network latency with your Amazon transfer for SFTP servers February 19, 2020
Lift and Shift migration of SFTP servers to Amazon February 12, 2020
Simplify your Amazon SFTP Structure with chroot and logical directories September 26, 2019
Using Okta as an identity provider with Amazon Transfer Family May 30, 2019