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Should it be possible to terminate SSL for wss (secure websockets) at a layer 4 load balancer?

Seems to me that wss (and ws) in general would require TCP routing since an HTTP reverse proxy wouldn't be able to make sense of the packets; and, SSL termination would require layer 7 routing since the session is really maintained above layer 4. I feel somewhat confident about the first statement, and much less so about the second.

Bonus question. If it is possible, in general, to achieve wss routing and ssl termination in a single load balancer, can it be done specifically with HAProxy? Nginx? Other?

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Yes, in theory. WSS uses HTTP for the handshake, once the session is negotiated it is passed to WSS.

However, load balancer come in many forms and protocol implementations can leave a lot to be desired.
NGNIX seems to be a good option as they actually provide mention to this on their website.

Resources: https://www.nginx.com/blog/websocket-nginx/

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/websocket.html?_ga=1.232918046.1407092516.1485627218

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