How do you get Amazon's ELB with HTTPS/SSL to work with Web Sockets?

node.js amazon-ec2 websocket amazon-elb
Art picture Art · Feb 7, 2012 · Viewed 21.8k times · Source

This doesn't seem to be working right now. I'm using Faye with NodeJS behind an Amazon ELB. When I switch on HTTPS the connections can no longer be brokered. I found a question here unanswered: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=283293 . Anyone able to get this working? Are there any work around outside of running my own instance of HAProxy?

Answer

Alessandro Alinone picture Alessandro Alinone · Feb 9, 2012

I confirm, based on our own tests, that configuring ELB on TCP/SSL, instead oh HTTP/HTTPS, makes the trick with WebSockets. The drawbacks are two:

1) As already pointed by arturnt, you cannot get stickyness.

2) You will lose the ability to retrieve the identity of the clients. The originating IP seen by your WebSocket server will be always the ELB one and, differently from the HTTP/HTTPS configuration, no X-Forwarded-For header will be added to the requests.

UPDATE July 2013: Amazon has just added support for Proxy Protocol, which solves drawback number 2 above. With the Proxy Protocol, a header containing the client's originating IP is added even when ELB works at TCP level, rather than HTTP. Full details: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/enable-proxy-protocol.html

UPDATE August 2016: Amazon has just announced new AWS Application Load Balancer, which supports WebSocket at Layer 7 (as well as HTTP/2.0 and content-based routing). See https://aws.amazon.com/it/blogs/aws/new-aws-application-load-balancer/

Related questions

AWS application load balancer and socket.io

I have a socket.io chat room running whose traffic is getting larger as we are running on one machine. We have ran benchmarks using the ws library for sockets and they do perform much better which would better utilize …

Read More
On EC2: sudo node command not found, but node without sudo is ok

I have just installed nodejs on a new EC2 micro instance. I installed it normally, ./configure -> make -> sudo make install. Problem: When I run "node" under ec2-user, it runs perfectly. When I run "sudo node", …

Read More
Node.js app can't run on port 80 even though there's no other process blocking the port

I'm running an instance of Debian on Amazon EC2 with Node.js installed. If I run the code below: http = require('http'); http.createServer(function (request, response){ response.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type':'text/plain'}); response.end('Hello World\n'); }).listen(80); console.log("…

Read More