VCC Live Now Supports HTTP/2

The VCC Live DevOps team is delighted to announce the deployment of support for the HTTP/2 protocol. This will make establishing an HTTPS connection faster, reducing latency by enabling request and response multiplexing — thus resulting in improved data transfer speeds— as well as enabling us to further optimize our applications’ performance.

What is HTTP/2?

HTTP/2 is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol which is the foundation of the World Wide Web. Derived from a deprecated open-specification networking protocol originally developed by Google, HTTP/2 was released by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2015.

The HTTP/2 protocol is a significant upgrade to its predecessor, the HTTP/1.1 protocol, which was standardised back in 1997, and continued to be the standard for nearly two decades.

What improvements does HTTP/2 have to offer?

HTTP/2 is backward-compatible with HTTP/1.1 in terms of transaction semantics. While HTTP/2 certainly improves on many of HTTP/1.1’s shortcomings, it does not ditch the application semantics of its predecessor, such as methods, status codes, header fields and the Uniform Resource Identifier. What has changed is how data is framed and transported between the client and the server. Luckily, these changes do not affect how already existing web applications work so they can be used without modification.

HTTP/2 supports full asynchronous request and response multiplexing. This allows a persistent connection to be maintained that can service multiple simultaneous requests,  reducing latency and connection loads on web servers.

HTTP/2 utilizes HTTP header field compression using HPACK. This reduces data redundancy, thus minimizing overheads.

HTTP/2 supports the use of server push. It allows servers to push responses into caches rather than the client having to wait for a new request for each resource.

HTTP/2 uses the ALPN (Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation) TLS (Transport Layer Security) extension. It offers improved encrypted connection speeds, since the application protocol is determined during the initial phase, thus avoiding additional round trips. This also makes the website loads faster.

At VCC Live we’re committed to bringing you unparalleled services and features in our software package. We believe under-the-hood improvements like introducing HTTP/2 support will result in noticeable improvements to performance levels.