How to set up SSL in a load balanced environment?

asp.net wcf infrastructure load-balancing
ronaldwidha picture ronaldwidha · May 4, 2009 · Viewed 8.9k times · Source

Here is our current infrastructure:

  1. 2 web servers behind a shared load balancer
  2. dns is pointing to the load balancer
  3. web app is done in asp.net, with wcf services

My question is how to set up the SSL certificate to support https connection.

Here are 2 ideas that I have:

  1. SSL certificate terminates at the load balancer. secure/unsecure communication behind the load balancer will be forwarded to 2 different ports.
    pro: only need 1 certificate as I scale horizontally
    cons: I have to check secure or not secure by checking which port the request is coming from. doesn't quite feel right to me

    WCF by design will not work when IIS is binded 2 different ports
    (according to this)

  2. SSL certificate terminates on each of the server?
    cons: need to add more certificates to scale horizontally

thanks

Answer

Alex Martelli picture Alex Martelli · May 4, 2009

Definitely terminate SSL at the load balancer!!! Anything behind that should NOT be visible outside. Why wouldn't two ports for secure/insecure work just fine?

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