Introduction
Enterprise applications and services often rely on load balancers to ensure reliability, availability, and performance by distributing traffic across multiple servers. Many load balancers provide capabilities to manage the asymmetric cryptographic handshakes that are required to establish connections for TLS, which is a protocol used to secure HTTPS traffic. TLS operations rely on compute-intensive ciphers that can consume significant CPU resources, especially when the load balancer is managing a large volume of requests. In this post, we demonstrate that it’s possible to significantly reduce CPU utilisation of HAProxy, a popular open source load balancer, by offloading these operations to IntelⓇ QuickAssist Technology (IntelⓇ QAT) in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The added benefits include:
- Handling larger volumes of traffic
- Energy savings
- Freeing up the CPU to handle other work
IntelⓇ QAT support on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
The IntelⓇ QAT accelerator is designed for…