A lot of larger companies use commercial load balancing appliances (A10 / F5) to provide a stable / secure implementation pipeline for SSL sites across multiple

A lot of larger companies use commercial load balancing appliances (A10 / F5) to provide a stable / secure implementation pipeline for SSL sites across multiple datacenters. Nginx/HAproxy are great if you're a developer (and in fact, many developers at these companies will use one of those behind an appliance) but they kind of suck if you're trying to manage SSL certificates across a few thousand domains load balanced in 2-3 datacenters with round-robin IPs. Also, the throughput on commercial load balancer appliances is crazy high, and there are plugins for injecting various headers, doing geographic load balancing, etc. Once you get into the high-traffic side of load balancing, your load balancer platform is also running your DNS -- so it can dole out the right IP address (with a short TTL, naturally) based on your proximity to specific exit nodes. It's nice to be able to manage all that from one platform if you're supporting several dozen sites / applications.