HTTP/2 support

Another great feature has landed on EvenNode - HTTP/2 support.

As requested by our community we've deployed support for HTTP/2 protocol to all our load balancers so that your users can load pages over secure connection faster than with HTTPS.

There are no changes required to your application. Our load balancers terminate HTTP/2 traffic and send HTTP traffic to your app over private network. Your app can continue listening for HTTP traffic and your users get HTTP/2 support.

HTTP/2 is a binary protocol as opposed to regular HTTP/1.1 which is a text protocol. In order to debug HTTP/2 you need to use tools such as curl or Wireshark's http2 dissector or similar.

The new HTTP/2 protocol allows you to push content via Link header. This approach is perfect for scenarios where you know the browser does not have the required content cached and it will request it when the page is loaded. Instead of waiting for the request to come, you can push the content with the response to the very first request and save another request from browser.

A single HTTP/2 connection can contain multiple concurrently opened streams. With HTTP/1.1 the browser opened multiple separate connections to request data. The concurrent connections with HTTP/1.1 are usually limited by the browser to a maximum of 8 concurrent connections to a domain. This has slowed down loading of pages especially on mobile connections.

The usual optimization techniques used to optimize delivery of content with HTTP/1.1 – such as CSS sprites – are no longer required. Majority of websites should see faster loading speeds with HTTP/2 out of the box.

Let us know what you think. Happy coding!