SSL termination is the process of decrypting traffic encrypted with SSL.
Secure Sockets Layer, SSL, is a protocol for establishing encrypted and authenticated links between networked computers in order to keep internet connections secure and to safeguard sensitive data.
SSL identifies information about the website, such as the domain name and, optionally, information about the site’s owner. SSL may be establishing links between server-to-server or server-to-client.
SSL termination reduces the load on your servers while speeding up and simplifying data exchanges. SSL termination allows your application to handle more connections at a time.
SSL termination works by communicating with the encrypted traffic before the data reaches your server. Next, SSL termination decrypts and analyzes the traffic to ensure the data is not malicious. After, SSL termination encrypts the traffic again and the traffic is sent to your servers.
After you add your SSL certificate and private key, SSL termination handles the SSL decryption at the load balancer. Your load balancer can also act as a gateway between HTTP/2 client traffic and HTTP/1.0 or HTTP/1.1 backend applications this way. For more information about SSL termination, see How to Configure SSL Termination.