Proxy Pains and Benefits Supporting HTTP/2 End to End - Susan Hinrichs
Channel: The ASF
Date: 2021-10-12

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Replicated A presentation from ApacheCon@Home 2021
https://apachecon.com/acah2021

Apache Traffic Server (ATS) proxies HTTP traffic. It has supported HTTP/2 for user agent requests almost since the HTTP/2 specification was finalized, but it does not support HTTP/2 for traffic from the proxy to the origin servers. ATS is not unique among proxy servers in supporting new protocols on the client side first. For reverse proxy deployments, many of the benefits for new proxy deployment are seen from the proxy side. An organization’s origin servers are less likely to immediately move to the bleeding edge protocol versions. For forward proxy deployments the benefits of supporting newer protocols are more obvious, but after time even for reverse proxy deployments the need for supporting newer protocols to origin servers increases.

ATS is in the process of refactoring to support multiple HTTP protocols to origin as well as from the user agent. In this talk, I will present some of the design issues we puzzled through and are still considering in this refactoring. For the different types of proxy deployments there are different constraints on supporting multiple protocols to origin. I will also present some preliminary performance experiences with the HTTP/2 to origin code base.