Back to Podcasts
LIVIN' ON THE EDGE PODCAST

HTTP/3: Use Cases, Envoy Support, and Google’s Rollout

About

With HTTP/3 being supported by 70%+ of browsers (including Chrome, Firefox, and Edge), and the official spec being finalized in June 2022, now is the time that organizations are beginning a widespread rollout of this protocol to gain performance and reliability. As leaders in the implementation of the HTTP/3 spec, Google and the Envoy Proxy teams have been working on rolling this out for quite some time, and they have learned many lessons.

Episode Guests

Alyssa Wilk
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google
Alyssa Wilk, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, recently spoke with Daniel Bryant, Head of DevRel at Ambassador Labs. In a wide-ranging discussion that covered how HTTP/3 has been implemented over QUIC and UDP, the benefits and challenges offered by the new protocol, and the experience of Google publicly rolling out support for this protocol, a number of key themes emerged:

A number of key themes emerged:

  • HTTP/2 sped up HTTP/1 dramatically – but if you lose one packet on a connection, everything gets stalled until the packet is retransmitted.
  • This is a fundamental limitation of TCP, so HTTP/3 speeds up HTTP/2 even more by implementing the protocol on top of UDP.

  • The two big wins in HTTP/3 are the zero roundtrip handshake and improved congestion control. With the former, if you have already connected to the server previously you can bypass the three-way TCP handshake. With the latter, if you drop a packet, HTTP/3 will recover better and faster than HTTP/2.

  • Moreover, because HTTP/3 is implemented in user space, you get these performance benefits even if you haven’t updated (or can’t update) your operating system kernel.

  • Because there’s on average 2% packet loss on the Internet, HTTP/3 benefits virtually everyone.

  • End users who see even more benefit are those on lossier networks (e.g., emerging markets, mobile, IoT use cases) and those on old kernels (e.g., Windows users at large companies that don’t upgrade).

  • Adding HTTP/3 support to a proxy, ingress, or Edge Stack API gateway is non-trivial (unlike HTTP/2) as the protocol has very sophisticated congestion control and cryptography that needs to be implemented.

Featured Episodes

Podcast

Livin’ On the Edge S3 Ep3: Unlocking the Power of Istio and Coraza

On Season Three, Episode Three of the Livin’ on the Edge podcast, I spoke with Jose Carlos Chavez, who is a software engineer at Tetrate and heavily involved with Istio, an open-source service mesh, that has been making waves in the world of microservices and cloud-native applications. Istio offers a range of features for traffic management, security, and observability, making it a valuable tool for developers and DevOps teams.

Podcast

Flynn from Buoyant & Cloud Native Happenings

In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud-native technology, APIs, Kubernetes, and service meshes, it's crucial to stay up-to-date with the latest developments and insights from experts in the field. That’s why, there’s no better time to revitalize our popular podcast, Livin’ on the Edge. We’re proud to say we’re back and better than ever!

Podcast

Dana Lawson on Kubernetes, Local Development Loops, and Constant Learning

In the sixth episode of the Ambassador Livin’ on the Edge podcast, Dana Lawson, VP of Engineering at GitHub, discusses the impact that Kubernetes has had on operations, how cloud has impacted the local development experience, and the benefits of constant learning. Be sure to check out the additional episodes of the "Livin' on the Edge" podcast.