SSL/TLS introduces tradeoffs between security, performance, and integration
While essential, SSL/TLS processing often adds measurable latency to each request, which quickly adds up at scale and can impact overall performance.
Many application delivery platforms require dedicated SSL/TLS processing hardware to maintain good performance. They can also fail to support the latest protocol standards — limiting how organizations can incorporate SSL/TLS into their tech stacks.
Speed matters
SSL/TLS processing incurs the largest performance hit during the handshake — especially on servers lacking ample CPU resources.
Implementation is lagging
21% of Amazon Alexa's top 100,000 websites don't use HTTPS, hinting at performance or implementation concerns.
HAProxy delivers flexible, high-performance SSL/TLS support
Boost application security while adding nearly zero latency. OCSP stapling, zero round trip time resumption (0-RTT), SSL/TLS session resumption, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), and more safeguard your traffic management.
HAProxy forwards over 2 million HTTP requests per second on a single Arm-based AWS Graviton2 instance
Learn how HAProxy achieved over 2 million requests per second (RPS) over SSL/TLS — without incurring performance penalties or facing bottlenecks — on just one Arm processor.

Automating and simplifying management for your public-key infrastructure (PKI)
HAProxy offers streamlined management and loading of thousands of certificates. Organizations can also enable server name identification (SNI) and use their preferred certificate authority with HAProxy — such as Let's Encrypt.

Take complete control over your encryption
HAProxy supports major TLS features to enhance the security and performance of your applications, APIs, and AI services.
Secure and high-performance encryption
Ensure data confidentiality and integrity with modern SSL/TLS encryption while maintaining optimal speed and reliability. HAProxy minimizes encryption overhead, allowing secure communication without sacrificing performance.
Minimal latency and resource usage
Optimize connection overhead using stateful and stateless session resumption, Keep-Alive, and connection reuse — reducing latency and improving server responsiveness.
Mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication
Implement mutual authentication between clients and servers using mTLS. By verifying both parties’ identities, mTLS strengthens security for applications, APIs, and zero-trust architectures.
Asynchronous cryptography
Perform cryptography operations asynchronously, improving efficiency for high-throughput environments and maintaining low latency under heavy loads.
Flexible encryption
Automatically use Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and RSA encryption algorithms — and the latest TLS 1.3 cypher suites — according to your use case.
Intelligent traffic routing
Match access control list (ACL) rules to SSL/TLS data. This enables smarter, dynamic traffic routing based on your security policies.
Encryption without compromise
Protect your application traffic and safeguard sensitive data, without worrying about performance or complexity.
HAProxy supports multiple popular SSL/TLS libraries. It's also compatible with modern QUIC applications.
Ultra-low latency encryption secures your traffic without sacrificing performance, ensuring responsive user experiences.
Bring your preferred certificate authority, security practices, and more to HAProxy. Centrally manage automated renewal, revocation, and deep observability for your SSL/TLS certificates with HAProxy Fusion.
HAProxy's high-performance TLS termination reduces server strain, helping you rapidly process more requests without top-shelf hardware (while requiring fewer instances).
Do more with HAProxy One
The world's fastest application delivery and security platform seamlessly blends data plane, control plane, and edge network to deliver the world's most demanding applications, APls, and Al services in any environment.
HAProxy Enterprise
A flexible data plane layer that provides high-performance load balancing, an API/Al gateway, Kubernetes application routing, best-in-class SSL processing, and multi-layered security.
HAProxy Fusion Control Plane
A scalable control plane that provides full-lifecycle management, monitoring, and automation of multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and multi-team HAProxy Enterprise deployments.
HAProxy Edge
A secure edge network that provides a high-capacity global ADN and threat intelligence — enhanced by machine learning — that powers the next-generation security layers in HAProxy Fusion and HAProxy Enterprise.
World-class experience
24/7 support from real humans! We're the authoritative experts on HAProxy — including the edge, data plane, control plane, and security layers. We'll do whatever it takes to make your HAProxy deployment a success.
What are users saying about HAProxy SSL/TLS processing?
“HAProxy Enterprise allows us to very reliably load balance between all of our components. It allows us to handle all SSL terminations while updating configurations very easily. It provides a ton of flexibility that saves us significant development time. Now, we can focus our time on making the overall developer experience better and building out new features for our customers.”
"HAProxy is fast, it will run well on the lowest spec hardware, and you don't even need to think about resources until you have tens of thousands of connections. Config changes, even things like adjusting TLS ciphers, can be completed with a service reload, which won't impact app availability. Coming from a windows environment where this would need a reboot is a breath of fresh air."
Seamless integrations with essential tech
