SAA-C03 Practice Question 76: Transfer Family Managed SFTP
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 8 · question 6 of 10
A bank receives nightly settlement files from 90 counterparties over SFTP. The files land on a pair of self-managed SFTP servers in a data centre, and a script then copies them into S3 for processing. Patching and capacity planning for those servers is a recurring burden, and the bank wants the files to arrive in S3 directly. Counterparties will not change their SFTP clients, hostnames, credentials or scripts.
Which solution meets these requirements with the least ongoing operational effort?
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Answer:
Transfer Family is a fully managed service that accepts SFTP, FTPS, FTP and AS2 transfers directly into and out of S3 or EFS. AWS describes the point of it in exactly the terms of this question: you keep existing client-side configurations for authentication, access and firewalls, so nothing changes for partners or their applications, and you get a protocol-enabled endpoint without running any server infrastructure. Associating the bank's existing hostname with the server endpoint means the 90 counterparties keep their scripts, and files land as S3 objects with no copy step.
Option A keeps every operational burden the bank is trying to shed (patching the daemon, managing host keys and user accounts, sizing the fleet), and adds a scheduled sync that delays processing and can fail silently.
Option C fails the hard constraint. The counterparties will not change their clients, and asking 90 external organisations to adopt AWS tooling and credentials is the largest change of the four options, not the smallest.
Option D solves a different problem. DataSync moves data between storage locations on a schedule; it does not terminate inbound SFTP sessions, so the bank would still have to run the SFTP servers that receive the files in the first place.
Reference: What is AWS Transfer Family?