TLS Load Balancing

Now that you understand what goes into encrypting something using TLS, you can see that it adds a significant layer of complexity to a normal HTTP connection. The complexities exist both in the establishment and in the effort spent to encrypt and decrypt a transaction. Thus the load placed on a normal HTTP server can be significantly increased with the added overhead of a TLS layer of communications.

This means that there is real benefit in load balancing the TLS portion of a communication as it will alleviate a significant amount of stress from your servers. The unfortunate thing about SSL load balancing is that it introduces a requirement that each connection needs to continue using one certificate and one session, meaning you can't readily divert SSL traffic between servers. Given the above, there are two ways that you can continue working on SSL going forward. These methods are called SSL acceleration and SSL termination.