Whats new in Sitecore 9.2? SSL offloading

In this post we will talk about a new feature that sitecore offers with the newly released 9.2 version, which is SSL Offloading, so, What is SSL Offloading? and What advantages I can get from it? and How I can do it with Sitecore 9.2?

What is SSL/TLS?

SSL/TLS is an encryption security protocol that ensure the privacy, authentication and data integrity of internet communication, SSL standards for Secure Socket Layer and TLS is Transport layer Security, SSL latest version was 3.0 and after that a new updates have been added and renamed to TLS, current version of TLS is 1.3.

The main goal of SSL is the encryption/decryption of data, through the handshake process between two devices, in addition to encryption, SSL is also digitally sign data in order to accomplish data integrity.

What is SSL Offloading?

With the existing of SSL alot of encryption and decryption operations are applied in addition to the handshake process [This is way optimized in TLS 1.3], and this will slow down the website because it will use a lot of resources, the process of delegating the functions required by SSL (encryption/decryption and Handshaking) to a load balancer as example is called "SSL offloading".

Whats is the advantages I get from SSL Offloading?

1. Free resources that were using for SSL functions, allow using these resources on the primary application functions.
2. It ca n help with HTTPs Inspection, reverse proxying, traffic regulation, and cookie persistence. 

How to enable SSL Offloading in Sitecore 9.2?

In your sitecore instance (need to be applied to instances behind a load balancer) navigate to the following path:

YourInstancePath\App_Config\Include\Examples\Sitecore.LoadBalancing.config.example

Just rename the above by removing .example from the end, then adjust the file content based on your balancer settings, following how the content of the file looks like:

Hope this was helpful!