Revisiting HTTP/2

On 8th May 2018 at The Financial Times as part of Andrew Betts (Clearing User Cache) and Hooman Beheshti (Revisiting HTTP/2)

RFC 7540 was ratified over 2 years ago and, today, all major browsers, servers, and CDNs support the next generation of HTTP. Just over a year ago, at Velocity (https://www.slideshare.net/Fastly/http2-what-no-one-is-telling-you), we discussed the protocol, looked at some real world implications of its deployment and use, and what realistic expectations we should have from its use.

Now that adoption is ramped up and the protocol is being regularly used on the Internet, it's a good time to revisit the protocol and its deployment. Has it evolved? Have we learned anything? Are all the features providing the benefits we were expecting? What's next?

In this session, we'll review protocol basics and try to answer some of these questions based on real-world use of it. We'll dig into the core features like interaction with TCP, server push, priorities and dependencies, and HPACK. We'll look at these features through the lens of experience and see if good practice patterns have emerged. We'll also review available tools and discuss what protocol enhancements are in the near and not-so-near horizon.

Session video

Slides

Hooman Beheshti