SSL and Load Balancing

What affect does SSL have on the way load balancing works? I know that you need to use sticky sessions if you have chosen to not store you session info in the DB or Out of Process but how does 开发者_开发技巧that effect SSL?

Just to clarify, the SSL/TLS sessions have nothing to do with the HTTP sessions. (Some implementations may use the SSL/TLS session ID as a basis for maintaining HTTP sessions, but this is a bad design, as SSL/TLS may change sessions completely independently what HTTP is doing).

In terms of load balancing, you get a couple of options:

• Use a load-balancer that is your SSL/TLS endpoint. In this case, the load-balancing will be done at the HTTP level: the client connects to the load-balancer and the load-balancer unwraps the SSL/TLS connection to pass on the HTTP content (then in clear) to its workers.

• Use a load-balancer at the TCP/IP level, which redirects entire the TCP connection directly to a worker node. In this case, each worker node would have to have the certificate and private key (which isn't necessarily a problem if they're administered consistently). Using this technique, the load balancer doesn't do any HTTP processing at all (since it doesn't look within the SSL/TLS connection): on the one hand this reduces the processing done by the load-balancer itself, on the other hand it would prevent you from dispatching to a particular worker node based on the URL structure for example. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages.