HTTP 2 In Action ((LINK))

HTTP/2 (originally named HTTP/2.0) is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web. It was derived from the earlier experimental SPDY protocol, originally developed by Google.[1][2] HTTP/2 was developed by the HTTP Working Group (also called httpbis, where "bis" means "twice") of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).[3][4][5] HTTP/2 is the first new version of HTTP since HTTP/1.1, which was standardized in RFC 2068 in 1997. The Working Group presented HTTP/2 to the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) for consideration as a Proposed Standard in December 2014,[6][7] and IESG approved it to publish as Proposed Standard on February 17, 2015 (and was updated in February 2020 in regard to TLS 1.3).[8][9] The HTTP/2 specification was published as RFC 7540 on May 14, 2015.[10]

HTTP 2 in Action

The biggest difference between HTTP/1.1 and SPDY was that each user action in SPDY is given a "stream ID", meaning there is a single TCP channel connecting the user to the server. SPDY split requests into either control or data, using a "simple to parse binary protocol with two types of frames".[25][29] SPDY showed evident improvement over HTTP, with a new page load speedup ranging from 11% to 47%.[30]

The HTTP/2 protocol also faced criticism for not supporting opportunistic encryption, a measure against passive monitoring similar to the STARTTLS mechanism that has long been available in other Internet protocols like SMTP. Critics have stated that the HTTP/2 proposal goes in violation of IETF's own RFC 7258 "Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack", which also has a status of Best Current Practice 188.[59] RFC7258/BCP188 mandates that passive monitoring be considered as an attack, and protocols designed by IETF should take steps to protect against passive monitoring (for example, through the use of opportunistic encryption). A number of specifications for opportunistic encryption of HTTP/2 have been provided,[60][61][62] of which draft-nottingham-http2-encryption was adopted as an official work item of the working group, leading to the publication of RFC 8164 in May 2017.

Although the design of HTTP/2 effectively addresses the HTTP-transaction-level head-of-line blocking problem by allowing multiple concurrent HTTP transactions, all those transactions are multiplexed over a single TCP connection, meaning that any packet-level head-of-line blocking of the TCP stream simultaneously blocks all transactions being accessed via that connection. This head-of-line blocking in HTTP/2 is now widely regarded as a design flaw, and much of the effort behind QUIC and HTTP/3 has been devoted to reduce head-of-line blocking issues.[63][64]

Each listener has a default rule, and you can optionally define additional rules. Each rule consists of a priority, one or more actions, and one or more conditions. You can add or edit rules at any time. For more information, see Edit a rule.

When you create a listener, you define actions for the default rule. Default rules can't have conditions. If the conditions for none of a listener's rules are met, then the action for the default rule is performed.

The action with the lowest order value is performed first. Each rule must include exactly one of the following actions: forward, redirect, or fixed-response, and it must be the last action to be performed.

When a fixed-response action is taken, the action and the URL of the redirect target are recorded in the access logs. For more information, see Access log entries. The count of successful fixed-response actions is reported in the HTTP_Fixed_Response_Count metric. For more information, see Application Load Balancer metrics.

You can specify an action when you create or modify a rule. For more information, see the create-rule and modify-rule commands. The following action sends a fixed response with the specified status code and message body.

You can use forward actions to route requests to one or more target groups. If you specify multiple target groups for a forward action, you must specify a weight for each target group. Each target group weight is a value from 0 to 999. Requests that match a listener rule with weighted target groups are distributed to these target groups based on their weights. For example, if you specify two target groups, each with a weight of 10, each target group receives half the requests. If you specify two target groups, one with a weight of 10 and the other with a weight of 20, the target group with a weight of 20 receives twice as many requests as the other target group.

The following action forwards requests to the two specified target groups, with target group stickiness enabled. Requests that do not contain the stickiness cookies are routed based on the weight of each target group.

When a redirect action is taken, the action is recorded in the access logs. For more information, see Access log entries. The count of successful redirect actions is reported in the HTTP_Redirect_Count metric. For more information, see Application Load Balancer metrics.

You can specify an action when you create or modify a rule. For more information, see the create-rule and modify-rule commands. The following action redirects an HTTP request to an HTTPS request on port 443, with the same host name, path, and query string as the HTTP request.

Each rule can optionally include up to one of each of the following conditions: host-header, http-request-method, path-pattern, and source-ip. Each rule can also optionally include one or more of each of the following conditions: http-header and query-string.

You can specify up to three match evaluations per condition. For example, for each http-header condition, you can specify up to three strings to be compared to the value of the HTTP header in the request. The condition is satisfied if one of the strings matches the value of the HTTP header. To require that all of the strings are a match, create one condition per match evaluation.

HTTP/2 adds a new interaction mode whereby a server can push responses to a client (Section 8.2). Server push allows a server to speculatively send data to a client that the server anticipates the client will need, trading off some network usage against a potential latency gain. The server does this by synthesizing a request, which it sends as a PUSH_PROMISE frame. The server is then able to send a response to the synthetic request on a separate stream.

HTTP/2 uses the same "http" and "https" URI schemes used by HTTP/1.1. HTTP/2 shares the same default port numbers: 80 for "http" URIs and 443 for "https" URIs. As a result, implementations processing requests for target resource URIs like or are required to first discover whether the upstream server (the immediate peer to which the client wishes to establish a connection) supports HTTP/2.

The means by which support for HTTP/2 is determined is different for "http" and "https" URIs. Discovery for "http" URIs is described in Section 3.2. Discovery for "https" URIs is described in Section 3.3.

A client that makes a request for an "http" URI without prior knowledge about support for HTTP/2 on the next hop uses the HTTP Upgrade mechanism (Section 6.7 of [RFC7230]). The client does so by making an HTTP/1.1 request that includes an Upgrade header field with the "h2c" token. Such an HTTP/1.1 request MUST include exactly one HTTP2-Settings (Section 3.2.1) header field.

The GOAWAY frame (type=0x7) is used to initiate shutdown of a connection or to signal serious error conditions. GOAWAY allows an endpoint to gracefully stop accepting new streams while still finishing processing of previously established streams. This enables administrative actions, like server maintenance.

The last stream identifier in the GOAWAY frame contains the highest-numbered stream identifier for which the sender of the GOAWAY frame might have taken some action on or might yet take action on. All streams up to and including the identified stream might have been processed in some way. The last stream identifier can be set to 0 if no streams were processed.

On streams with lower- or equal-numbered identifiers that were not closed completely prior to the connection being closed, reattempting requests, transactions, or any protocol activity is not possible, with the exception of idempotent actions like HTTP GET, PUT, or DELETE. Any protocol activity that uses higher-numbered streams can be safely retried using a new connection.

The :authority pseudo-header field includes the authority portion of the target URI ([RFC3986], Section 3.2). The authority MUST NOT include the deprecated userinfo subcomponent for http or https schemed URIs.

This pseudo-header field MUST NOT be empty for http or https URIs; http or https URIs that do not contain a path component MUST include a value of '/'. The exception to this rule is an OPTIONS request for an http or https URI that does not include a path component; these MUST include a :path pseudo-header field with a value of '*' (see [RFC7230], Section 5.3.4).

An intermediary can receive pushes from the server and choose not to forward them on to the client. In other words, how to make use of the pushed information is up to that intermediary. Equally, the intermediary might choose to make additional pushes to the client, without any action taken by the server.

In HTTP/1.x, the pseudo-method CONNECT ([RFC7231], Section 4.3.6) is used to convert an HTTP connection into a tunnel to a remote host. CONNECT is primarily used with HTTP proxies to establish a TLS session with an origin server for the purposes of interacting with https resources.

For https resources, connection reuse additionally depends on having a certificate that is valid for the host in the URI. The certificate presented by the server MUST satisfy any checks that the client would perform when forming a new TLS connection for the host in the URI.

Implementations MUST NOT generate this error in reaction to the negotiation of a cipher suite that is not on the black list. Consequently, when clients offer a cipher suite that is not on the black list, they have to be prepared to use that cipher suite with HTTP/2. 041b061a72