AWS Transfer Family adds identity provider options and enhanced monitoring capabilities

Starting today, you can use AWS Lambda with your AWS Transfer Family server to integrate an identity provider of your choice. This results in easier ways to authenticate and authorize your users. Additionally, you can now monitor your file transfers using a centralized CloudWatch metrics dashboard in the AWS Transfer Family Management Console.

AWS Transfer Family provides fully managed file transfers over SFTP, FTPS, and FTP for Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS. Today, you have three options for managing identities with AWS Transfer Family – service managed, Microsoft Active Directory (AD) integration using AWS Directory Services, and a custom identity provider of your choice. Until today, supplying an API Gateway URL was required to integrate a custom identity provider, even when using AWS Lambda to interface with the identity provider. With this launch, you can directly integrate your identity provider using AWS Lambda, simplifying user access management. Continue using Amazon API Gateway if you need a RESTful API to connect to your identity provider, or if you want to leverage AWS WAF for its rate limiting and geo-blocking capabilities.

You can now also access CloudWatch graphs for metrics such as number of files and bytes transferred in the AWS Transfer Family Management Console, giving you a single pane of glass to monitor file transfers using a centralized dashboard.

Support for both features is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Transfer Family is available. To learn more about using AWS Lambda to integrate an identity provider, read the documentation or deploy this CloudFormation template to get started.