title: SSL Termination at F5 or ZUUl/Eureka/Services?
body: <p>We have a few services running in our environment with Spring Cloud Netflix, Eureka and Zuul. Also, we use Spring Boot for developing the services.</p>
  
  <p>We also F5 as the hardware load balancer which receives the external requests and routes them to one of ZUUL instances based on the configured rule.</p>
  
  <p>As of now, we use HTTP for communication between the services. We now want to secure all communications via HTTPS.</p>
  
  <p>All the services including ZUUL and Eureka are scaled up with 2 instances in separate machines for failover.</p>
  
  <p>My question is should I setup and enable HTTPS for each of the services including Eureka,ZUUL ad other downstream services (OR) Is it possible to only use HTTPS only for the F5. and leave the other instances in HTTP itself.</p>
  
  <p>I heard of a feature called SSL Termination/off-loading which is provided by most load balancers. I am not sure F5 support it. If it supports would it make sense to only use it for HTTPS and leave the rest in HTTP.</p>
  
  <p>I feel this can reduce the complexity in setting up SSL for each of the instances(which can change in the future based on the load) and also reduce the slowness which will be inherent with SSL decryption and encryption.</p>
  
  <p>Should I secure every instance including eureka/zuul and downstream services or just do ssl-termination at F5 alone.</p>