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BY DAWN PARZYCH
It is hard to believe that HTTP has been getting used for 25 years and we are now only on the second version; while Chrome
has only been in existence for seven years yet is on version 45. This is a first in a series of blog posts designed to give you all
the information you need to know about HTTP/2 - what it is, why it matters, what you need to do, if you have to re-design your
website and when should you start planning.
As a result of the increased demands placed on web applications, developers created work arounds such as spriting data,
sharding domains, and concatenation to try and improve the performance of their applications, but these workarounds could
be time consuming and did not work for all sites. A universal easy solution was needed. In 2009 Google took the first step
towards a new solution with the creation of SPDY, which set the ball rolling for the HTTP/2 specification.
For those of you that saw the image of the dancing baby and must see the video again (or for the first time) here it is.
Browser support is only half of the equation, your application delivery infrastructure also has to support HTTP/2. This could
mean web servers, application delivery controllers or your CDN. While 59% of browsers support HTTP/2 as of September
2015, only 1.2% of web sites use the protocol, according to W3Techs. You might be thinking that 1.2% is a very small
percentage, but remember that the standard only became a proposed RFC in May, which means in four short months 1.2% of
web sites have implemented the standard, and out of the two most popular servers Nginx released initial support yesterday
(September 16) and Apache has not yet released support. Expect to see this number rise rapidly in coming months as the
servers, proxies and CDNs that previously implemented SPDY roll out HTTP/2 support.
Instart Logic supports SPDY today and we are currently testing HTTP/2 internally. Production support will be rolling out in
coming months, stay tuned for more information on this exciting development. With Nginx releasing initial support, and
production support planned for a later date, the other notable HTTP/2 release to look out for is Apache. The Apache module
mod_h2 is currently in development and is listed as not hardened enough for production use as of September 2015.
In the next post I will dig into the technical details of the specification and how it compares/differs from HTTP/1.1