In a traditional environment/architecture a client makes a request for a certain webpage, where webserver process the client request and sends a response back to the client. The modern websites and architecture does this process smartly with the help of SSL offloading.
Let’s start deeper to understand SSL offloading more…
SSL offloading is the process of relieving the webservers from the task of encryption and decryption.
There are SSL off-loader devices like Citrix NetScaler, F5 which comes with separate Application Specific Integrated processors (ASIC) that offsets the webserver’s task of Decryption /Encryption by limiting the SSL traffic handling to itself and perform the encryption and decryption intensive task on behalf of the web applications.
This free up the processing power of the web application servers whose now work is to provide the appropriate response to the client request as fast as it can. In a nutshell, this is how SSL offloading works.
There are some other terms to SSL offloading like SSL Accelerators & SSL load balancing.
A load balancer can be any modern device which helps to improve the distribution of workload amongst various resources available. For instance, limiting the SSL handshaking process to itself and forwarding the plain text data to the least occupied backend server.
