BYTE the Cloud

Chris 0:00
All right, let's jump into AWS transfer family. It's like a managed FTP service, but for the cloud, yeah, it handles all those file transfers you need to and from your AWS storage services. And as a cloud engineer, you know, especially if you're working with AWS, you've probably run into needing secure file transfer, right? Maybe you're even studying for an AWS certification exam,

Kelly 0:23
yeah, if you are, this is an important service to know. It really takes away the headache of setting up and managing those FTP servers on your own, exactly.

Chris 0:30
And, you know, managing those FTP servers, it can get really complicated, absolutely time consuming, yeah, and honestly, not the most fun part of our

Kelly 0:40
job definitely not. Frees you up to focus on, well, everything else that makes up your cloud infrastructure.

Chris 0:46
Okay, so let's talk about where transfer family really shines. Like, imagine you're working at a media company, okay, and you've got these massive video files, huge, yeah, that need to get uploaded to S3 for processing and distribution. Transfer family can make that whole process, you know, smooth, secure and efficient.

Kelly 1:03
Absolutely. Think about like a financial institution. They need to transfer sensitive data all the time, right to EFS for analysis and reporting and transfer. Family can give them that security and those compliance controls they've got to have. And here's

Chris 1:16
the cool part, it's not just FTP, you know, stuck in the past, right? It can handle SFTP, FTPS, even plain old FTP for those legacy systems,

Kelly 1:25
yeah, the ones that just won't die. That versatility is key. It means you don't have to, like, start from scratch with your workflow exactly. You

Chris 1:33
don't disrupt what's already working. And speaking of what's already working, we have to talk about how well transfer family fits into the AWS ecosystem. We're talking IAM for access control, CloudWatch to keep an eye on those file transfers, and VPC for network security, all about a strong, secure solution exactly that works within the AWS framework. We already know. So we've got a good idea of what transfer family is and why it matters. But now let's really dig into the features and benefits. Let's get into

Kelly 2:00
the nitty gritty. One of the biggest advantages, and this is absolutely crucial these days, is the whole security setup. We're talking encryption in transit with FTPS and SFTP, so your data is protected as it moves between those systems and

Chris 2:16
it doesn't end there. You can use AWS, KMS, oh yeah,

Kelly 2:19
good old Key Management Service encrypt your

Chris 2:21
data at rest. That's another layer of protection, defense

Kelly 2:24
in depth. Got to protect that data at every stage, and it's

Chris 2:28
not just about security, right transfer family gives you centralized control over like who has access and what their permissions are. It integrates right to IAM so you can manage who sends files where, with a lot of decision, granular control.

Kelly 2:41
It's essential for compliance. Can't forget those policies.

Chris 2:44
Now no service is perfect, and transfer family does have its limitations, like it can't transfer files directly between two on premises servers. Yeah,

Kelly 2:52
that's a good point. It's really built for moving files between your on premises systems and those AWS storage services.

Chris 2:58
Okay, so we've laid some groundwork here. We know what transfer family is, why it matters, some key features. Now let's switch gears. Let's do it. It's exam prep time. Let's tackle some questions you might see about transfer family on an AWS certification exam.

Kelly 3:11
All right, let's start with a scenario. Let's say you're at a company that needs to transfer, I don't know, tons of data from their own data center to S3 regularly, and they really need a secure and managed solution that fits with their current identity provider.

Chris 3:28
So the question is, what AWS service would you recommend and why? Okay,

Kelly 3:32
in this case, it's got to be AWS transfer family. It's all the marks, secure file transfer, easy integration with S3 works with external identity providers. No problem.

Chris 3:41
So what about transfer family makes it the right choice here?

Kelly 3:44
Well, first off, security always got to be top of mind, right? Encryption in transit, encryption at rest, that data's got to stay confidential. Second, it plays nice with IAM. You manage those users and permissions based on your company's identity provider. No need to create separate AWS credentials. And third transfer. Family loves automation, APIs, SDKs, you can streamline those data transfers, schedule them however you need. Okay, so that's security,

Chris 4:09
integration, automation, all covered. Now let's say this company is also worried about keeping an eye on those file transfers. They want to know if something goes wrong. What would you recommend

Kelly 4:20
CloudWatch? God bringing CloudWatch integrate that with transfer family, and you can see those file transfer metrics set up alarms if something fails or looks weird, get a real good sense of how those transfers are doing.

Chris 4:31
That proactive monitoring can really save you. It stops those little issues from becoming big problems. Now let's hit another common exam question, user authentication in transfer family. How does that work? Well,

Kelly 4:43
transfer family is pretty flexible when it comes to authentication. You can use IAM users. I am roles for temporary credentials and identity federation for those external identity providers like Active Directory. Let's say

Chris 4:55
the company has a really strict security policy. They want multi factor. Authentication for everyone who touches transfer family. How would you do that? I

Kelly 5:04
am, again, I am has got great MFA capabilities. You set it up so anyone who needs to use transfer family, they've got to use MFA adds that extra layer of security, Password Plus something else. Another

Chris 5:15
layer of security always a good thing. Okay, new scenario. Let's say a company needs to transfer files from their on premises systems to an EFS file system. They want a solution that's highly available. Can handle some faults. You know,

Kelly 5:29
transfer family is a good fit there, too. Why that? Well, you can deploy transfer family in multiple availability zones so you've got that high availability for your file transfers. Okay, one availability zone goes down. No problem. The service keeps running from another one, minimal downtime. And EFS is designed for high availability and durability. Your data is safe even if something happens to the infrastructure.

Chris 5:50
So high availability fault tolerance essential for those really critical applications. Now let's get into some trickier exam questions. How does transfer family compared to other services like AWS DataSync,

Kelly 6:03
this is where knowing the details matters. Transfer family is designed for those one off file transfers and for when people need to upload and download so people are interacting with it using protocols like FTP. It's a good replacement for those traditional FTP servers. But DataSync, that's for automated, scheduled transfers big data sets moving between on premises and AWS storage, or even between different AWS storage services.

Chris 6:28
So how do you decide which one to use? Well, if

Kelly 6:30
you're moving a ton of data between, say, your own systems and AWS storage, DataSync is probably going to be more efficient. It's got those optimized data transfer mechanisms. But if you need people to be able to upload and download files whenever they need using those standard protocols like FTP, then transfer family is the way to go. So

Chris 6:47
it's all about choosing the right tool for the job. You've got to know what eservice is good at, all right? Let's try another tough one. What are some security best practices for transfer family?

Kelly 6:58
Okay, so security always going to be top priority, right with transfer family, a few things come to mind. First, always, always encrypt in transit at rest, protect that data, okay? Second, use IAM, principle of least privilege, you know, only give users the permissions they actually need to do their job. Makes sense. Third, keep those security groups and network ACLs updated control who can talk to your transfer family endpoints, limit that traffic. Okay? And fourth, turn on CloudTrail logging. Keep track of all that file transfer activity for auditing security analysis, you need that audit trail, who accessed what, when and from where. So encryption,

Chris 7:39
access control, network security logging, got it now, what if a company wants to limit access to their transfer family server to just a certain range of IP addresses? That's where security

Kelly 7:49
groups come in handy. Again. They're like a firewall for your transfer family server. You set up a rule that only allows traffic from those specific IP addresses, anything else

Chris 8:00
blocked, so only authorized IPS can get in. And what if they want to restrict the protocols that could be used, like maybe they only want SFTP for that extra security. Easy.

Kelly 8:09
You can handle that when you first set up your transfer family server, you choose which protocols are allowed. So in this case, just enable SFTP and disable everything else makes

Chris 8:19
sense only the most secure protocols allowed. Now let's talk about cost. How do you keep costs down with transfer family cost optimization.

Kelly 8:27
It's like a game, right? And in this game, you gotta pick the right instant size for your server. Don't go overboard. Only use what you need over provisioning costs money,

Chris 8:36
so don't get more than you need. Got

Kelly 8:38
it exactly, and use that. Free tier. AWS gives you some free data transfer every month, great for small jobs or for testing things out. Okay? Free tier, good to know. Also keep an eye on how you're using the service cloud. Watch can help with that. If you're not using something all the time, maybe downsize it or even shut it down.

Chris 8:54
Makes sense. Don't pay for what you're not using. And if you've

Kelly 8:57
got long term, predictable workloads, think about reserved instances for transfer family they can save you a lot compared to on demand pricing,

Chris 9:05
so right sizing, free tier monitoring, reserved instances, all good strategies for keeping those costs down. Now disaster recovery, what if a company needs a plan for their transfer Family Service? What would you suggest disaster

Kelly 9:20
recovery, it's all about planning for the worst. For transfer family, you want to deploy your server in multiple availability zones. That way, if one zone has an outage, your service just keeps running from another zone, no downtime, no data loss. And to be extra safe, back up your server configuration and any important data to a separate location, like an S3 bucket in a different region, so

Chris 9:42
you're covered no matter what. Okay, another tricky question, what are some limitations of using AWS transfer family with EFS?

Kelly 9:48
Transfer family and EFS work well together, but there are a few things to remember. EFS is built for lots of clients accessing it at the same time, so if you need exclusive file locking, it might not be the best choice. Choice, you might need a different solution or find another way to handle that. Concurrency and EFS performance can be a little unpredictable. It depends on the size of the files, how they're accessed, so testing and optimizing is important.

Chris 10:12
So know the limits and test things out. Good advice. Now let's talk bigger picture. How does transfer family fit into a larger cloud architecture. How does it work with other AWS services? Well, it's

Kelly 10:23
not an island. It's a big part of those hybrid cloud environments. You know where you need to move files between your own data center and AWS securely? Right? You can use it with S3 for object storage, EFS for file storage, Lambda for serverless computing, even EC2 for virtual servers. It helps you build those complete data pipelines. It's

Chris 10:42
really versatile. It fits into all these different scenarios. Okay, we've covered a lot about AWS transfer family, from the basics to some pretty tough exam level questions. We've gone deep. We've talked security integration, cost optimization, even disaster recovery. But before we wrap up this part of our deep dash, let's think about the future. How do you see AWS transfer family evolving?

Kelly 11:04
That's a good question. I think we'll see even more focus on security performance and integration with other AWS services, maybe tighter integration with Security Hub for centralizing security monitoring and with glue for managing and finding data assets. Sounds

Chris 11:20
like it's gonna be even more powerful and easier to use. Those are some exciting possibilities. Yeah,

Kelly 11:24
and as more companies move to hybrid and multi cloud setups, services like transfer family are gonna be even more important. You gotta be able to move that data around securely and reliably. It's all about

Chris 11:35
connecting the dots, making sure everything works together. All right, pop quiz time put that AWS knowledge to the test. Let's say a company wants to move a ton of data. We're talking a lot of data from their own storage to Amazon S3 they need a solution that can handle files bigger than five terabytes. What AWS service would you pick for that?

Kelly 11:53
Okay, that's a good one. It really shows what you need to understand the limits of each AWS service. Now, transfer family is great for a lot of file transfers, right? But it's not the best choice here, not for files that big. So

Chris 12:05
what would you use instead for a big data move like that? I'd

Kelly 12:09
go with AWS Snowball. Okay, it's a physical storage appliance. You can load it up with data and ship it to AWS. It's made for those massive data migrations files way bigger than five terabytes. It's a cost effective way to move terabytes, even petabytes, of data. Okay, so

Chris 12:26
that's a key difference. Transfer family is good for files up to a certain size. Snowball's for those really, really big transfers, where you actually physically move the data

Kelly 12:34
exactly. It's those little details that can make or break you on the exam. You gotta show that you really know AWS and the right tools for each job.

Chris 12:43
So let's switch gears a bit. Another thing that might come up on the exam data integrity. With transfer family. How does it make sure that data arrives safe and sound without any corruption? Yeah,

Kelly 12:54
that's critical, especially when you're dealing with sensitive data. Data integrity is everything. Transfer family uses checksums. They're like unique fingerprints for the data. Okay? It compares the checksums on both sides, source and destination. That's how it makes sure the data is identical.

Chris 13:10
So if something gets messed up during the transfer, the checksum comparison will flag. It no corrupted data sneaking through exactly.

Kelly 13:17
It'll either retry the transfer or report an error. You don't want data loss or corruption, that's for sure. So

Chris 13:23
we're talking about a solid system for making sure the data stays intact the whole way through. Okay, okay, let's go back to disaster recovery, but this time specifically for transfer family. What are your top recommendations for a disaster recovery plan?

Kelly 13:38
Well, the goal is to minimize downtime, keep things running. So for transfer family, you want to deploy those servers in multiple availability zones within the same AWS region. That way, if one zone goes down for whatever reason, your service keeps going from another zone, redundancy is key, and to make it even more bulletproof, back up your server configurations and any really important data to a separate location, maybe an S3 bucket in a different region, just to be safe.

Chris 14:05
So high availability with the multIAZ setup and data protection with backups, a good two pronged approach. Now, let's say a company needs to move files from their own systems to an EFS file system, but they want to use their existing identity provider like Active Directory, they don't want to create new AWS credentials, just use what they already have. Yeah,

Kelly 14:25
that's pretty common, especially for companies moving to the cloud or doing a hybrid setup, and like we talked about before, transfer family is good for sending files to EFS, and it can work with those existing identity providers. Okay, so

Chris 14:36
how does that integration work? How do they use their existing credentials? It

Kelly 14:39
uses identity federation. It's a way to use your existing identity provider, like Active Directory, to handle authentication for AWS. So no

Chris 14:47
new AWS credentials for those users, they just use their regular login. Keeps things simple and keeps those security policies consistent exactly,

Kelly 14:54
streamlines everything, makes it easier to manage, no need for extra credentials floating around. Found

Chris 15:00
so less admin work, and it's more secure. Now let's talk about another thing that's important for the exam, logging and monitoring in transfer family. How do you keep track of what's going on with your file transfers? Logging

Kelly 15:12
and monitoring can't live without them, right? For security, compliance, troubleshooting? Absolutely. Transfer family works with CloudTrail and CloudWatch. CloudTrail logs every API call made to the service. It's like a detailed record of everything that happens with your file transfers. Who transferred, what, when, where from. Really important for security compliance and those forensic investigations if you ever need them. So from

Chris 15:36
a security and compliance standpoint, CloudTrail gives you that audit trail and CloudWatch. What does that do?

Kelly 15:42
CloudWatch gives you real time monitoring. You see metrics about your transfer family deployments, like the number of transfers, how fast they are, any errors, things like that. Okay, you

Chris 15:51
can create dashboards, set alarms if something's off. Gives you a really good picture of how those transfers are performing.

Kelly 15:57
So CloudWatch is about real time visibility. You can catch problems before they get too big. Okay, time for another exam question. A company wants a secure way to transfer files, but they only want access from their own network, no public internet access allowed. What would you recommend? Good

Chris 16:16
question, it really shows you got to know how to deploy and secure these AWS services, transfer family has security groups, IAM policies, all that good stuff, but it's not designed to lock down access to just a private network.

Kelly 16:29
So what would you use in this case to keep it completely isolated?

Chris 16:32
VPN. Set up a VPN connection between their network and the AWS VPC where transfer family is running, okay, creates a secure tunnel only traffic from their network can get through, keeps it off the public Internet, and only authorized users can access it. So it's like a private pathway just for them, no one else can get in. All right, let's get a little more technical. How does transfer family deal with firewalls? You know that a lot of companies have strict firewalls that block outgoing traffic. Yeah,

Kelly 16:58
that's a good point. Corporate firewalls can be tricky, but transfer family has a few ways to handle it.

Chris 17:05
Okay? What are they? How do you get around those firewall rules?

Kelly 17:07
You could try passive mode FTP, the client starts both connections, the command and the data connection, that can sometimes get you around firewall issues or use SFTP. It uses one connection for both commands and data, and it's encrypted. So it's usually easier to set up firewall rules for SFTP compared to regular FTP, and if those don't work, you can try a reverse SSH tunnel transfer family initiates the connection to the client inside the network. It's like turning the connection around so the server can bypass the firewall and connect securely.

Chris 17:40
So a few different options depends on how the network is set up and how tight their security is. Now let's talk about cost again. How do you keep costs down? With transfer family, those cloud bills can add up.

Kelly 17:50
Keeping costs down is always important, right? With transfer family, first thing is to right size your server. Don't pick a huge instance if you don't need

Chris 17:58
it. Right. Right sizing. Match the server to the workload Exactly.

Kelly 18:01
And don't forget that free tier AWS gives you some free data transfer each month, great for small jobs or testing, okay? And CloudWatch that's your friend. Monitor your usage. If you're not using the server much, maybe downsize or shut it down completely.

Chris 18:16
Don't pay for what you're not using makes sense, right? And for

Kelly 18:19
those long term, predictable workloads, look into reserved instances. Can be a lot cheaper than paying on demand. So

Chris 18:26
we're back to right sizing, free tier monitoring and reserved instances. All good strategies. Yeah, now let's switch to security again. What are some best practices for securing your transfer, family deployments? Got to keep that data safe. Security

Kelly 18:39
is everything, especially in the cloud. First and foremost, encrypt everything in transit at rest. Encryption always Yep, use IAM principle of least privilege. Don't give users more access

Chris 18:51
than they need. Limit the damage if something does happen exactly

Kelly 18:55
and use security groups control that incoming and outgoing traffic, lock it down based on your security needs another layer of protection, right? And last but not least, keep an eye on things, okay, stay up to date on the latest security features, best practices. Things change all the time. You got to stay ahead of the bad guys.

Chris 19:13
Always be learning. Always be improving good advice. Now the other question for you, a company needs to transfer files to S3 but they want to encrypt those files during transfer and while they're stored. What would you recommend for that? This

Kelly 19:27
is about defense. In depth, you want multiple layers of protection. Okay? For this, I'd say use SFTP or FTPS for encryption during transfer. They both create a secure channel and then enable server side encryption on the S3 bucket where the files are going. So

Chris 19:42
double encryption, secure wallets moving and secure wallets stored exactly

Kelly 19:46
protects your data the whole way through.

Chris 19:48
That's a good strategy. Okay, let's try a tougher one. A company has an SFTP server on their own network, and they want to switch to transfer family, but they don't want to start from scratch with all their. Users and permissions. How can they make that move easier? That's

Kelly 20:03
a pretty common situation. Fortunately, transfer family has some tools to make that migration smoother. Okay, good. The trick is to use AWS, APIs or SDKs. You can automate the whole process. Okay, first, export your user and permission data from your old SFTP server, usually as a CSV or JSON file, then you can use the APIs or SDKs to import that data right into transfer family. It'll create matching IAM users and roles with the correct permissions

Chris 20:32
so it takes care of all the mapping, no manual work, less chance of making mistakes. But what about any scripts or applications that use the old server? How do you make sure they work with transfer family? Good

Kelly 20:41
question. You'll need to update those scripts and applications to point to the new transfer family endpoint. It'll have a different address, and you might have to change the authentication methods too, like if your scripts were using passwords, you might need to switch them to IAM roles or identity federation.

Chris 20:57
So some updates are needed to make sure everything works with the new service. Makes sense. Now, let's say a company wants to use transfer family to send files to S3 but they want to control access to specific folders within the bucket. They don't want everyone to have access to everything. That's

Kelly 21:15
pretty common, especially when you have big S3 buckets with data for different teams or applications, right? There are a couple of ways to do that. Okay,

Chris 21:22
what are they? How do you lock down access to just certain parts of the bucket? You could use IAM

Kelly 21:27
policies. They let you control who can do what with specific parts of the x3 bucket, you can create policies that only allow access to certain folders. That way you have really fine grained control so you

Chris 21:39
can customize those permissions very specifically. What's the other option?

Kelly 21:42
S3 access points. They're like named endpoints for your S3 bucket. You can set them up with specific permissions, like limiting access to certain folders. So it's

Chris 21:51
a more centralized way to manage access and security. You set the rules the access point and everyone has to follow exactly

Kelly 21:57
easier to manage and more secure. Now let's talk about performance. Let's say a company wants to transfer files to EFS, but they're worried about speed. They want those transfers to be as fast as possible. Yeah,

Chris 22:10
performance is always important. What are some ways to speed up those transfers to EFS? Well, first,

Kelly 22:16
make sure your transfer family server is up to the task. It needs enough network bandwidth and processing power to handle the load. So the server needs to be powerful enough, right? You don't want a bottleneck there. It's like having a fast car, but driving it on a dirt road. You need a good, wide highway to go fast. I

Chris 22:33
like that analogy. So a powerful server is the foundation. What else can you do?

Kelly 22:38
Use transfer family's multi part upload feature. It breaks those big files into smaller chunks and transfers them all at the same time. That can really speed things up, especially when you have large files and a lot of bandwidth. So parallel

Chris 22:51
transfers, that's a classic technique, and it's not just about the transfer family server, right? You have to think about EFS,

Kelly 22:58
right? You got to optimize both sides. Make sure your EFS file system is set up for performance. Use the general purpose performance mode. It's good for most workloads. Choosing the right performance mode can make a big difference. So

Chris 23:10
optimize transfer family. Optimize EFS got it. What about file compression? Does that help? Definitely,

Kelly 23:17
if you're transferring lots of small files, compress them first reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred so it can be faster, especially if your network isn't the fastest, compression

Chris 23:27
is always a good idea, especially when you're moving a lot of data. Now let's try a question that involves multiple AWS services. A company needs to send files to S3 but they also want to run a Lambda function to process those files as soon as they arrive. They want to automate the whole thing. How would you do that? Using transfer family and Lambda? That's

Kelly 23:46
a great example of how you can connect different AWS services to create really powerful workflows. Yeah. For this, you would use an S3 event notification. Okay, so when a file gets uploaded, it triggers an event, like a signal saying, Hey, new file here.

Chris 24:01
I like that. So it's like a notification system within S3 Exactly,

Kelly 24:04
yeah. And you can set it up to trigger a Lambda function. So

Chris 24:08
the Lambda function gets information about the file, and then it can do whatever it needs to do, like process the data, check it, send notifications Exactly.

Kelly 24:15
It's a really smooth way to automate tasks based on file transfers. Serverless computing at its best,

Chris 24:22
that's really cool. So much you can do with these integrations. Okay, okay, let's shift gears a bit and talk about best practices for managing transfer family. What are some things to keep in mind to make sure everything runs smoothly? Managing

Kelly 24:34
transfer family? Well, it involves a few key things. First, have a good naming convention for your servers and other resources, makes it much easier to keep track of everything, especially if you have a lot of servers or different environments. So organization is important. Absolutely you want to be able to find things quickly and use Version Control for your server configuration, the way you can track changes and go back to an older version if something breaks like a safe. It

Chris 25:00
makes sense. You always want a way to go back if you need to right and set up monitoring

Kelly 25:03
and alerting with CloudWatch catch those performance issues or errors early on before they become big problems, so

Chris 25:11
you can fix things before they affect users or applications exactly, and

Kelly 25:14
don't forget documentation. Make sure your team knows how everything is set up and managed. Good documentation makes things a lot smoother, so

Chris 25:22
everyone's on the same page, no confusion, no silos of knowledge, good practices all around okay, we've covered a lot about AWS, transfer, family features, benefits, limitations, those tough exam questions. We've talked security integration, cost optimization, even disaster recovery. But before we wrap up, let's go back to the future. What do you see happening with transfer family down the road? Well,

Kelly 25:46
I think we'll see even more focus on security performance integration, maybe tighter integration with Security Hub for that centralized security monitoring and with glue for managing and finding data,

Chris 25:57
so it'll be even more secure and easier to manage. What about automation? Any predictions there?

Kelly 26:02
I think we might see more automation, maybe automatic file conversion or integration with data governance tools, anything to streamline those workflows make things easier for us. That would

Chris 26:14
be great. Less manual work, less room for error. Okay, last challenge, question for today, a company needs to transfer files to S3 but they have strict rules. All data has to be encrypted using their own keys. They don't want to use AWS managed keys. They want complete control. What AWS service would you recommend?

Kelly 26:34
Okay, so they need total control over their encryption keys for this, I'd recommend AWS transfer family and server side encryption with customer provided

Chris 26:41
keys. Can you explain how that works and how it meets the requirements? Sure,

Kelly 26:46
with transfer family, you can set up server side encryption for S3 so all files are encrypted at rest, and by using customer provided keys, they have complete control. They create and manage those keys outside of AWS, they're responsible for storing and protecting them, so

Chris 27:02
AWS never sees those keys, which is great for security and compliance. It meets their need for control exactly.

Kelly 27:08
It gives those companies with strict data policies the flexibility and control they need. It's about picking the right service for the job, and with AWS, there are a lot of services that seem like they do the same thing.

Chris 27:20
Yeah, it can be hard to keep track of them all,

Kelly 27:22
but that's what we do, right? We figure out how each service works, what it's good at, what it's not so good at, and then we can pick the

Chris 27:27
right one. Okay, so we've covered a lot of ground with AWS transfer, family. We've looked at the features, benefits, limitations, and some exam style questions. We talked security, integration, cost, even disaster recovery. But before we wrap up this deep dive, I think it's worth going back to that comparison we made in the beginning. How does transfer family compare to DataSync? Now that we've really dug into transfer family, I think we can understand the differences better.

Kelly 27:54
Good point, it's easy to get those two mixed up, but they really do have different strengths.

Chris 27:58
So can you remind us what are the key differences? What makes you choose one over the other? Sure

Kelly 28:02
transfer family is really designed for those ad hoc file transfers, like when someone needs to upload a file or download something. It's a good replacement for those old FTP servers, but with the security and management benefits of

Chris 28:15
AWS, so it's more user driven for those smaller transfers, exactly.

Kelly 28:19
It's like a secure FTP server in the cloud, ready to go whenever you need it. Datasync, on the other hand, that's for those big automated data transfers, moving lots of data between your own systems in AWS or between different AWS services. So

Chris 28:33
datasync is about moving large amounts of data efficiently, right? It's like a high

Kelly 28:37
speed data pipeline, and knowing the difference between these two is important, both for real world scenarios and for the exam.

Speaker 1 28:44
Okay, so we've reached the end of our deep dive into AWS transfer family. I think we covered a lot. We looked at the features, benefits, limitations, and even tackled some tricky exam questions. We talked about security integration, cost optimization and even disaster recovery. But remember, this is just the start. The cloud is always changing. There are always new services and features to learn. So stay curious, keep exploring and keep learning. Thanks for joining us for this deep dive into AWS transfer family.