What is the impact of using SSL between a load balancer and Bitbucket node pool members?

[Christopher Lankow]

I would like to talk about the following recommendation for Bitbucket Data Center

                Terminating SSL (HTTPS) at your load balancer and running plain HTTP from the load balancer to Bitbucket Server is highly recommended for performance. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/bitbucket-data-center-requirements-913477100.html

What is the “performance” impact of leaving it on.  This could be a challenge for us due to our security organization's rules.

[Alexis Robert]

Hi @Christopher Lankow , 

I think the problem here with Data Center is that a lot of synchronization happens between the nodes as they have to keep a lot of information shared between them, and adding as additional layer with SSL could potentially degrade performance.

But if you think your network is robust enough, then you could have end to end encryption. Have you tried it ?  

[Christopher Lankow]

We do use SSL, but we are using it between apache httpd and the load balancer, we are not putting it on the application JVMs.  It had been working well for us.

[Christopher Lankow]

We implemented in July 2019.

[Alexis Robert]

OK I see, in my case I've worked on Data Center where Apache was used as a load balancer and reverse proxy, so there were no issues of traffic between 2 separate components.