Load Balancing - HTTPS Requests

It is difficult to load balance and maintain session information of requests that come in over HTTPS, as they're encrypted. The hardware load balancer cannot redirect requests based on the information in the header, cookies, or URL readings. There are two options to solve this problem:

1) Web server proxies
2) Hardware SSL decoders.

Web server proxy that sits in front of a cluster of Web servers takes all requests and decrypts them. Then it redirects them to the appropriate node, based on header information in the header, cookies, and URL readings.

Web server proxy that sits in front of a cluster of Web servers takes all requests and decrypts them. Then it redirects them to the appropriate node, based on header information in the header, cookies, and URL readings.




Hardware SSL Decoder
Finally, we should mention that there are hardware devices capable of decoding SSL requests. A complete description of them is beyond the scope of this article, but briefly, they sit in front of the hardware load balancer, allowing it to decrypt information in cookies, headers and URLs.