We have a cluster of Cassandra servers on the backend and I wanted to compress the traffic to to reduce overall network utilization. The backend Cassandra servers communicate over port 80 via an nginx proxy and answer requests from the front end client servers for DB look ups. We need to load balance the http requests from the front end clients to the many backend Cassandra nodes, which is where the LTM comes in.
Alternatively I could just have all the requests from the clients originate compressed and just pass through the LTM, skipping compression altogether.