Can't Write to Public Files but Permissions Appear Fine

Question

Need the internet to confirm my sanity. On a Drupal 7 site it's saying "The directory sites/default/files is not writable." So I checked every permission but I don't see the issue. Since this isn't a public server, I temporarily turned off SELinux. Another Drupal 8 site is running on the same server with the exact same permissions. What am I missing?

getenforce output:

Permissive

ps aux | grep httpd output:

root     29064  0.0  0.1 262224  6492 ?        Ss   18:26   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -DFOREGROUND
apache   29065  0.0  0.0 261884  3672 ?        S    18:26   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -DFOREGROUND
apache   29066  0.0  0.2 1188648 10040 ?       Sl   18:26   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -DFOREGROUND
apache   29067  0.0  0.2 1778408 8000 ?        Sl   18:26   0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -DFOREGROUND

/sites/default/files is a symlink and the permission should be ignored

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root   root    31 Mar 18 18:14 files -> /mnt/efs/website/publicfiles/

So let's go down the tree

drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 6144 Feb 17 23:27 efs

drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 6144 Feb 17 23:28 website

drwxrwxr-x 110 apache web 141312 Mar 18 18:16 publicfiles

EDIT (from comment below): /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

<Directory "/var/www/html">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

<VirtualHost *:80>
... server info ...
<Directory "/var/www/html/website/public_html">
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

.htaccess:

# Follow symbolic links in this directory.
Options +FollowSymLinks

Answer 1

Finally managed to solve this. The entire purpose of this cloned server was to test out speed improvements from PHP-FPM. So since PHP evaluation is essentially offloaded to PHP-FPM, it doesn't matter if httpd has permissions, it matters whether the php-fpm process has permissions.

ps aux | grep php-fpm output:

root      5744  0.0  0.3 462268 14988 ?        Ss   16:45   0:00 php-fpm: master process (/etc/php-fpm.conf)
php-fpm   5745  0.0  0.9 467332 35196 ?        S    16:45   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
php-fpm   5746  0.0  0.4 466656 16528 ?        S    16:45   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
php-fpm   5747  0.0  0.3 466656 14032 ?        S    16:45   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
php-fpm   5748  0.0  0.3 466656 14028 ?        S    16:45   0:00 php-fpm: pool www

groups php-fpm:

php-fpm : php-fpm

So the ownership of my folder as apache:web is what doesn't fit. I just added the user php-fpm to the group web and changed things back to 775.

sudo usermod -aG web php-fpm

I would love comments on pros and cons of what I see as other possible solutions, especially from a security perspective:

1) Add php-fpm to the 'web' group.

2) Make php-fpm the owner, and httpd as member of web so it can still serve the files later.