Securely transferring data from Postgres to Amazon S3 using WAL-E

Question

I want to use WAL-E to backup my PostgreSQL data to Amazon S3. I am trying to determine if the data is encrypted in transit from Postgres to S3 using SSL/TLS but the documentation is not entirely clear on this point. I see WAL-E uses boto library and I believe by default it uses SSL/TLS but can anybody confirm or tell me how to configure WAL-E to ensure it does use SSL/TLS?

Answer 1

HTTPS is the default, but you can manually specify the S3 endpoint to force the protocol.

https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e#manually-specifying-the-s3-endpoint

The format is that of:

protocol+convention://hostname:port Where valid protocols are http and https, and conventions are path, virtualhost, and subdomain.

Example:

Turns off encryption and specifies us-west-1 endpoint.

WALE_S3_ENDPOINT=http+path://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com:80

For radosgw.

WALE_S3_ENDPOINT=http+path://hostname

As seen when using Deis, which uses radosgw.

WALE_S3_ENDPOINT=http+path://deis-store-gateway:8888