How to Transfer Files between AWS EC2 and S3 Buckets in Seconds

Move your data like a Pro!

You are a data scientist, a developer or some kind of data engineer, who needs some computation powers from AWS. You upload your files with scp from your local machine to your EC2 instance, and after some computations, you download them back to your machine.

If this scenario is true, you may have encountered some of the following problems:

1. Download speed in this coffee shop is SO SLOW!
2. Upload speed in this coffee shop is SO SLOW!
3. My Spot instance was shut down, now I have to upload all files again!
4. My spot instance was shut down, now all results are gone!
5. Hey, can you send me all the 400GB data we used for this project?

Behold, there is a solution for this! Simply share your files between co-workers and / or instances with AWS S3 Buckets! How? That’s pretty easy if you follow 3 simples steps, explained below.

Install AWS CLI Tools

The first step is to download the AWS command line tools. Assuming you’re on a good old Ubuntu machine, simply type the following command and you’re good to go.

$ sudo apt-get install awscli