Daniel Stenberg: Content over HTTP/2 |
Roughly a week ago, on August 19, cdn77.com announced that they are the first CDN to publicly offer HTTP/2 support for all customers, without beta limitations. They followed up just hours later with a demo site showing off how HTTP/2 might perform side by side with a HTTP/1.1 example. And yes, the big competitor CDNs are not yet offering HTTP/2 support it seems.
Their demo site initially got critized for not being realistic and for showing HTTP/2 to be way better in comparison that what a real life scenario would be more likely to look like, and it was also subsequently updated fairly quickly. It is useful to compare with the similarly designed previously existing demo sites hosted by Akamai and the Go project.
cdn77s offering is built on nginxs alpha patch for HTTP/2 that was anounced just two weeks ago. I believe nginxs full release is still planned to happen by the end of this year.
Ive talked with cdn77s Jakub Straka and their lead developer Honza about their HTTP/2 efforts, and since I suspect there are a few others in my audience whore also similarly curious Im offering this interview-style posting here, intertwined with my own comments and thoughts. It is not just a big ad for this company, but since theyre early players on this field I figure their view and comments on this are worth reading!
Ive been in touch with more than one person whove expressed their surprise and awe over the fact that theyre using this early patch for nginx to run in production. So I had to ask them about that. Below, their comments are all prefixed with CDN77 and shown using italics.
CDN77: Yes, we are running the alpha patch, which is basically a slightly modified SPDY. In the past we have been in touch with the Nginx team and exchanged tips and ideas, the same way we plan to work on the alpha patch in the future.
Were actually pretty careful when deploying new and potentially unstablepackages into production. We have separate servers for http2 and we are monitoring them 24/7 for any exceptions. We also have dedicated developers who debug any issues we are facing with these machines. We would never jeopardize the stability of our current network.
Im not an expert on neither server-side HTTP/2 nor nginx in particular , but I think I read somewhere that the nginx HTTP/2 patch removes the SPDY support in favor of the new protocol.
CDN77: You are right. HTTP/2 patch rewrites
