What is the primary purpose of SSL certificates in the context of load balancers?

The primary purpose of SSL certificates in the context of load balancers is to encrypt communication between clients and the load balancer. When SSL certificates are deployed, they enable secure connections over the internet by using the HTTPS protocol. This ensures that any data transferred between the client (such as a web browser) and the load balancer is encrypted and thus protected from interception or tampering by malicious actors.

By utilizing SSL certificates, load balancers can handle the encryption and decryption process, allowing for secure data transmission while also offloading the processing burden from backend servers. This enhances both security and performance, as the backend servers can focus on handling requests without the overhead of SSL termination.

In contrast, while optimizing traffic management or monitoring and logging traffic are important functions of load balancers, those tasks do not involve SSL certificates directly. Similarly, managing data requests from Amazon RDS pertains to database operations, which is unrelated to the primary function of SSL certificates in securing client communications.