AWS News Blog

Keeping Customers Happy – Another New Elastic Load Balancer Feature

Voiced by Polly

We added SSL support to the Elastic Load Balancer a couple of weeks ago. This met the needs of many of our users, but not all of them. Some of our users wanted to be able to tell if the HTTP requests arriving at their EC2 servers had been transmitted across the Internet using HTTPS. For example:

One question. How will the webservers know the original request came from HTTPS?
We currently add the “X-Forwarded-Proto: https” header when that happens.

As I always do, I passed this feedback along to the proper team for consideration. The “voice of the customer” is highly valued at Amazon, and feedback like this helps us to assign the proper priority to each feature.

I am happy to be able to report that we were able to turn this request around very quickly and I am happy to say that requests processed by newly created Elastic Load Balancers now include two additional headers:

  • X-Forwarded-Proto specifies the protocol (“http” or “https”) of the original request made to the Elastic Load Balancer.
  • X-Forwarded-Port specifies the port of the original request.

These headers are injected when the request arrives at the Elastic Load Balancer. If the headers are present on incoming requests they will be overwritten.

If you would like to be part of a team that can turn on a dime, check out the following jobs:

  • Software Development Engineer – Elastic Load Balancing.
  • Senior Software Development Engineer – Elastic Load Balancing.

— Jeff;

Modified 2/2/2021 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.