Lightboard Lessons: Crypto Offload

If you aren't encrypting all your web application traffic, then you soon will be. And, with all that encrypted traffic flowing to/from your web servers, you have the unenviable task of encrypting and decrypting it all. Well, you can overwhelm your web servers with the task of encrypting/decrypting everything, or you can let the BIG-IP do it all for you. Easy choice, right? If you're as awesome as I think you probably are, you are using BIG-IP for it's amazing SSL offload capabilities. But, did you know that you can now offload the expensive key exchange operations to an external network hardware crypto device? Imagine you have a bunch of stuff hosted in the cloud (and you love that), but you need some custom-built hardware support for all the computationally expensive crypto operations. You're gonna love crypto offload...