AWS Transfer Family

AWS Transfer Family is a managed endpoint that speaks standard file-transfer protocols and writes straight into AWS storage. It exists so that a migration does not have to break every partner integration and every legacy job that expects an FTP server: the clients, credentials and firewall rules stay as they are, and the files land in S3 or EFS instead of on a server somebody has to keep patched.

Supported protocols

• SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol, version 3)
• FTPS (FTP over TLS)
• FTP (plaintext, for endpoints reachable only inside a VPC)
• AS2 (Applicability Statement 2), for business-to-business exchanges that need signing, encryption and message disposition notifications built into the protocol
• Browser-based transfers via Transfer Family web apps, which give business users a managed web interface onto Amazon S3 Access Grants with no client software at all

Supported storage

• Amazon S3
• Amazon EFS (NFS file systems)

Beyond the endpoint

Managed File Transfer Workflows run after an upload lands: copying, tagging, scanning, filtering, compressing and decompressing, encrypting and decrypting, with the whole chain logged for audit. This is where the “managed file transfer” claim earns its keep — the alternative is a cron job on a box nobody owns.

Authentication can be delegated to an external identity provider, so partner access is governed by the directory that already governs everything else rather than by a list of SSH keys.

Transfer Family runs across up to three Availability Zones behind an auto-scaling fleet.

graph LR subgraph "Clients" SFTP[SFTP client] FTPS[FTPS client] FTP[FTP client] AS2[AS2 partner] WEB[Web browser] end subgraph "AWS Transfer Family" TF[Managed endpoint / web app] WF[Managed workflow] end subgraph "AWS Storage" S3[(Amazon S3)] EFS[(Amazon EFS)] end SFTP --> TF FTPS --> TF FTP --> TF AS2 --> TF WEB --> TF TF --> WF WF -->|Read/Write| S3 TF -->|Read/Write| EFS classDef protocol fill:#1EC9E7,stroke:#232F3E,stroke-width:2px,color:black classDef storage fill:#3F8624,stroke:#232F3E,stroke-width:2px,color:white class SFTP,FTPS,FTP,AS2,WEB protocol class S3,EFS storage style TF fill:#FF9900,stroke:#FF9900,color:white style WF fill:#FF9900,stroke:#FF9900,color:white

Where it fits

Transfer Family is an access layer, not a migration tool. Move the bulk of the data with DataSync, then put a Transfer Family endpoint in front of the S3 bucket so the existing clients never notice the move. If on-premises applications need to keep mounting the data as a file share rather than pushing it over FTP, S3 File Gateway is the right layer instead.