AWS Transfer Family provides fully managed Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP) over TLS, and FTP support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), enabling you to seamlessly migrate your file transfer workflows to AWS.

Today I am happy to announce AWS Transfer Family now also supports file transfers to Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems as well as Amazon S3. This feature enables you to easily and securely provide your business partners access to files stored in Amazon EFS file systems. With this launch, you now have the option to store the transferred files in a fully managed file system and reduce your operational burden, while preserving your existing workflows that use SFTP, FTPS, or FTP protocols.

Amazon EFS file systems are accessible within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and VPC connected environments. With this launch, you can securely enable third parties such as your vendors, partners, or customers to access your files over the supported protocols at scale globally, without needing to manage any infrastructure. When you select Amazon EFS as the data store for your AWS Transfer Family server, the transferred files are readily available to your business-critical applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as well as to containerized and serverless applications run using AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda.

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Using Amazon EFS – Getting Started
To get started in your existing Amazon EFS file system, make sure the POSIX identities you assign for your SFTP/FTPS/FTP users are owners of the files and directories you want to provide access to. You will provide access to that Amazon EFS file system through a resource-based policy. Your role also needs to establish a trust relationship. This trust relationship allows AWS Transfer Family to assume the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to access your file systems so that it can service your users’ file transfer requests.

You will also need to make sure you have created a mount target for your file system. In the example below, the home directory is owned by userid 1234 and groupid 5678.

$ mkdir home/myname
$ chown 1234:5678 home/myname

When you create a server in the AWS Transfer Family console, select Amazon EFS as your storage service in the Step 4 section Choose a domain.

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When the server is enabled and in an online state, you can add users to your server. On the Servers page, select the check box of the server that you want to add a user to and choose Add user.

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In the User configuration section, you can specify the username, uid (e.g. 1234), gid (e.g 5678), IAM role, and Amazon EFS file system as user’s home directory. You can optionally specify a directory within the file system which will be the user’s landing directory. You use a service-managed identity type – SSH keys. If you want to use password type, you can use a custom option with AWS Secrets Manager.

Amazon EFS uses POSIX IDs which consist of an operating system user id, group id, and secondary group id to control access to a file system. When setting up your user, you can specify the username, user’s POSIX configuration, and an IAM role to access the EFS file system. To learn more about configuring ownership of sub-directories in EFS, visit the documentation.

Once the users have been configured, you can transfer files using the AWS Transfer Family service by specifying the transfer operation in a client. When your user authenticates successfully using their file transfer client, it will be placed directly within the specified home directory, or root of the specified EFS file system.

$ sftp myname@my-efs-server.example.com sftp> cd /fs-23456789/home/myname
sftp> ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 3486 1234 5678 Jan 04 14:59 my-file.txt
sftp> put my-newfile.txt
sftp> ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 3486 1234 5678 Jan 04 14:59 my-file.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 1002 1234 5678 Jan 04 15:22 my-newfile.txt

Most of SFTP/FTPS/FTP commands are supported in the new EFS file system. You can refer to a list of available commands for FTP and FTPS clients in the documentation.

Command Amazon S3 Amazon EFS
cd Supported Supported
ls/dir Supported Supported
pwd Supported Supported
put Supported Supported
get Supported Supported including resolving symlinks
rename Supported (only file) Supported (file or folder)
chown Not supported Supported (root only)
chmod Not supported Supported (root only)
chgrp Not supported Supported (root or owner only)
ln -s Not supported Supported
mkdir Supported Supported
rm Supported Supported
rmdir Supported (non-empty folders only) Supported
chmtime Not Supported Supported

You can use Amazon CloudWatch to track your users’ activity for file creation, update, delete, read operations, and metrics for data uploaded and downloaded using your server. To learn more on how to enable CloudWatch logging, visit the documentation.

Available Now
AWS Transfer Family support for Amazon EFS file systems is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Transfer Family is available. There are no additional AWS Transfer Family charges for using Amazon EFS as the storage backend. With Amazon EFS storage, you pay only for what you use. There is no need to provision storage in advance and there are no minimum commitments or up-front fees.

To learn more, take a look at the FAQs and the documentation. Please send feedback to the AWS forum for AWS Transfer Family or through your usual AWS support contacts.

Learn all the details about AWS Transfer Family to access Amazon EFS file systems and get started today.

— Channy;

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