SFTP Server on AWS Server

[blackscooby]

Hi,

Does anyone understand the AWS pricing policies ?
I've been asked by work to set up an AWS instance so that we can sftp files to and from sites and then back down to our company network.

However it's a minefield of costings...

I could set up an Amazon EC2 instance as below with minimum CPU and memory and a fair bit of storage.

Amazon EC2
Region: EU (London)

Operating system (Linux),
Quantity (1),
Pricing strategy (EC2 Instance Savings Plans 3 Year No UpFront),
Storage amount (200 GB), Instance type (t4g.medium)

Monthly:22.43 USD
Upfront:0.00 USD

Which comes to $22.43 a month.

However, if I go to
https://aws.amazon.com/aws-transfer-family/pricing...

And put in 200Gb a month (Inbound and outbound) it comes to a MASSIVE $217 a month.

Example 1: Single protocol use

Assume you set up your endpoint and enable it for SFTP access. You then configure 20 end users to access data stored in your Amazon S3 bucket over SFTP. In total, your users download 1 GB/day of data from your Amazon S3 bucket. We calculate your monthly AWS Transfer Family costs using pricing in the US-East-1 Region as follows:

SFTP enabled on your endpoint: At $0.30 hourly rate, your monthly charge for SFTP is:

$0.30 * 24 hours * 30 days = $216

SFTP data upload and download: At $0.04/GB, your monthly charge for data uploads and downloads over SFTP is:

$0.04 * 1 GB * 30 days = $1.20

Adding the charges above, your total monthly bill for the AWS Transfer Family would be:

$216 + $1.20 = $217.20.


Can I not set up an Amazon EC2 instance with ssh enabled on port 22 and can thus SFTP to it and save a gargantuan $200 a month?

Thanks
BS

[deckster]

It does seem a bit mad. But I guess you're paying for an enterprise service and not having to maintain/patch everything yourselves. Still sounds expensive I agree.

Is there a reason why something simple like a shared Google drive won't work?

[nebpor]

Transfer family has more security (IAM permissions to control access) and is a fully resilient endpoint that will always be available, with durable storage in S3, hence it's more expensive as AWS are managing much more on your behalf and you should never lose your data - with EC2 all of these things are considerations.

How much data will you transfer per month, as you need to factor in EC2 data transfer costs? How much instance storage do you need? If it's down for 5 minutes is that a problem?

[blackscooby]

Thanks for all the replies.
I need to get to the bottom of what has been presented to our customer as to the SFTP server and the specifics in terms of security.
I'm under the impression we can only use certain suppliers AWS is approved, but is that only AWS with PAM ?? I don't know yet.
It does appear costly if I select to use their SFTP server, but we probably don't need all their redundancy.

Literally a Raspberry Pi with a whacking storage device attached would do technically from my perspective !

I'm more than happy to maintain the AWS instance, and it doesn't matter if there is down time here and there so long as we can get files off the customer site and back to our site within a reasonable time period. Hours... not seconds.

[Scabutz]

blackscooby said:

Hi,

Does anyone understand the AWS pricing policies ?

No, one does, not even Amazon. I use AWS at work all though dont get involved with the bill, but i use the "free tier" at home for personal stuff. Took me weeks to work out why I was being charged for free stuff.

Sorry I know thats no help, just some solidarity brother.

[Monsterlime]

Couldn't you just use an S3 bucket? Instead of the nightmare of SFTP, which if in the AWS Transfer Family would be backed by S3 anyway, just use the S3 bucket. You can either user IAM roles/users or access keys and specific software (such as Cloudberry - https://www.msp360.com/explorer/windows/amazon-s3.... others do exist) to transfer the data.

You can use the AWS CLI or Powershell cmdlets as well, so scripting is easy. Scripting an SFTP in Windows is a PITA (usually needing the WinSCP dll etc), but with the AWS tools S3 is easy. The GUI tools make it easier than an SFTP for an end user as well, IMO.

Unfortunately you will pay egress fees to AWS, but that is really how the big cloud providers make most of their money. If AWS are already an approved supplier, you might have an account manager and they could help you with the cost/billing aspect as that is the most complicated and irritating part of AWS (and most cloud services tbh).

[nebpor]

+1 on using a non-SFTP client and dumping files onto S3 instead - S3 is virtually free if you're using reduced redundancy storage.

If you do need SFTP and thus need to run it on EC2, if you can script starting up and configuring SFTP, then just launch the latest EC2 Amazon Linux image and setup a CRON job to update it every night, in case there is a patch. It can be put in an autoscaling group of 1, so that if there is an error and the instance fails it will be automatically restarted for you

If you can script something at the client ends, then you can just start the instance for the duration of the FTP job and turn it off again once the files have been received at the other end - will cost absolute buttons in compute time in that case, albeit you still have data out transfer costs (data in is free).