I worked on a few CDN projects, and on a DC project for Alibaba. Even in 2013, I think, all big CDNs used Intel hardware accelerators.
The beauty of this approach is that if you need more TLS bandwidth, you just plug more TLS cards, and you are done.
Otherwise, it's impressive to see how much TLS throughput people can get on CPUs today. Back in 2013, the best accelerator was only able to pull like 30Gb/s per card
- disk DMA writes page from disk into DRAM
- CPU (or PCIe crypto accel DMA) reads page from DRAM
- CPU (or PCIe crypto accel DMA) writes encrypted page to DRAM
- NIC DMA reads encrypted page from DRAM
- disk DMA writes page from disk to DRAM
- NIC DMA reads page from DRAM to NICBack then it was a realm of custom FPGA setups with very few niches like digital TV broadcasting, or expensive VPN appliances.
Ideally, I would've liked it a lot if the NIC could've spoken directly with the raid card or NVME using PCIE P2P... dreaming too big
Looks a lot now, but back then you didn't have server CPUs with gazillion cores on the cheap.
It was also about getting more bandwidth to a single server. 20Gb/s was a practical limit per mainstream server, but with accelerators you could've multiplied it many times more than the fastest CPU on the market.
You also didn't have the AES instruction set to improve the SSL performance.