If someone hands you an IP:Port of a Google Cloud load balancer, and tells you to
connect there with TLS, but all you receive in return is an F
(and a few other
bytes with none printable characters) on running openssl s_client -connect ...
,
you might be missing SNI (server name indication). Sadly the other side
was not transparent enough to explain in detail which exact type of Google Cloud
load balancer they used, but the conversation got more detailed and up to a working
TLS connection when the missing -servername foobar.host.name
was added. I could not
find any sort of official documentation on the responses of the GFE (the frontend part)
when TLS parameters do not match the expectations. Also you won't have anything in the
logs, because logging at Google Cloud is a backend function, and as long as your requests
do not reach the backend, there are no logs. That makes it rather unpleasant to debug such cases,
when one end says "I do not see anything in the logs", and the other one says "you reject
my connection and just reply F".