Let’s Azure: Migrate SFTP Server to Azure

FTP Servers are one of those legacy, where migrating to cloud can be daunting and can seem like a large undertaking by your team, especially because SFTP servers handles critical data integrations with upstream and downstream systems and has a huge business dependency that can’t skip a beat.

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The SFTP servers in an organization are often blackboxes that everyone is scared to touch, because someone set it up years ago (and has since left) and you don’t know all the wires there.

This blog describes some interesting ways to architecture and migrate an on-premises file transfer solution into Azure cloud. If you are getting into cloud and your Secure Shell (SSH) File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) server is still holding onto the on premise infrastructure, here are the exciting ways that you can migrate your FTP, SFTP, MFTP into cloud beating the scare.

Here we will discuss two easy to configure architecture solutions

The VM based Architecture of SFTP

This is the simple and straight forward architecture. Here you setup an Azure VM and configure your SFTP Application in VM. Replicate the folder hierarchy and you can transfer your files from on premise server into the new VM.

SFTP on VM. The diagram is an artwork of the author

What is interesting here is that, this architecture gives a lot more than just your on-premise SFTP server. You may use the AzCopy in VM to move files into an Azure Storage — Blob or ADLSGen2. We may also integrate Event Grid to trigger Azure Functions or Data Factory that may copy files into SharePoint, send email notifications, call external REST APIs and many more integrations.

The Serverless Architecture of SFTP

This approach is more of an innovation in the FTP server configuration. When we want to move away from managing VMs, severless is the most cost effective option. We use serverless in databases, applications, API hosting etc. and this one is a new addition to all these — the SFTP Server(less)

Serverless Architecture of SFTP. The diagram is an artwork of the author

Here we use an Azure Data Lake Gen2 (ADLS) Storage to act as the primary file storage for SFTP. ADLS is wrapped with a Private EndPoint and Azure SFTP Gateway, so it functions as fully secured SFTP Server. We can enable either Basic Authentication of SSH KeyPair based authentication.

Like the previous VM approach, in this Serverless approach also we may integrate Event Grid to trigger Azure Functions or Data Factory that may copy files into SharePoint, send email notifications, call external REST APIs and many more integrations.

And the diamond on the crown is that we can access the “SFTP Server” through REST API as well. So if my external partner doesn’t want to use SFTP for file transfer, we do not need to create a separate file system for them, unlike the tradition SFTP server. Simply enable API Gateway and they can transfer file into the same storage through REST API.

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Happy Azuring and Happy Coding !!!!