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This is something that I spent a lot of time on a few years ago.

Some of the HTTP accelerator servers I ran were in countries or sites that were more problematic than others, so it was desirable to not locate SSL keys on them. Instead of handling HTTP, the servers would become a TCP level proxy, and forward resp / req packets between a server with the SSL key and the client.

The biggest hurdle is that without being able to decrypt the incoming SSL, you can't know anything about the HTTP request -- including hostname or path. So you have to forward all of your received traffic to the same place, and you can only vary the destination based on the source IP that receives it.

IPs are limited. There is no way that Cloudflare could have even 1 IP for each of their customers in each of their sites around the world, it simply cannot be done.

There is lots of other common functionality that you lose (edge caching, cookie routing, etc.) but the inability to route at layer 7 is the big one.




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