I found that there is a fair deal of overhead when uploading a lot of small files to S3. Some of this overhead comes from SSL itself.

How safe is it to talk to S3 without SSL when running in EC2?

From the awesome comments below, here are some clarifications: this is NOT a question about HTTPS versus HTTP or the sensitivity of my data. I'm trying to get a feeling for the networking and protocol particularities of EC2 and S3. For example

• Are we guaranteed to be passing through only the AWS network when communicating from EC2 to S3
• Can other AWS users (apart from staff) sniff my communications between EC2 and S3
• Is authentication on their api done on every call, and thus credentials are passed on every call? Or is there some kind of authenticated session. I am using the jets3t lib.

Feedback from people with some AWS experience would be appreciated.

Thanks Marc