The impression I got from the article was that the warm keep-alive connections were encrypted - the SSL handshake takes place ahead of time and then tunnels multiple requests from multiple users - hence the lower latency.

Amazon's ELB (the EC2 load balancer) used to send HTTPS traffic to your back-end unencrypted, but I believe they have since fixed this.

Not sure what you mean by your ELB/HTTPS comment. ELB can be used as an HTTPS terminator. It will then proxy traffic to your backend as HTTP. It can also be used as a straight TCP proxy, but in that case it's just shoving along the HTTPS request to an HTTPS terminator that you maintain.

>> Not sure what you mean by your ELB/HTTPS comment. ELB can be used as an HTTPS terminator. It will then proxy traffic to your backend as HTTP.

That's what I mean. In that mode it's sending traffic that should be HTTPS over HTTP.

No, the pool of keep-alive connections are all encrypted as well.