on 02-Apr-2020 10:38
QUIC [1] is a new transport protocol that provides similar service guarantees to TCP, and then some, operating over a UDP substrate. It has important advantages over TCP:
Google started experimenting with early versions of QUIC in 2012, eventually deploying it on Chrome browsers, their mobile apps, and most of their server applications. Anyone using these tools together has been using QUIC for years! The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to standardize it since 2016, and we expect that work to complete in a series of Internet Requests for Comment (RFCs) standards documents in late 2020.
The first application to take advantage of QUIC is HTTP. The HTTP/3 standard will publish at the same time as QUIC, and primarily revises HTTP/2 to move the stream multiplexing down into the transport.
F5 has been tracking the development of the internet standard. In TMOS 15.1.0.1, we released clientside support for draft-24 of the standard. That is, BIG-IP can proxy your HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 servers so that they communicate with HTTP/3 clients.
We rolled out support for draft-25 in 15.1.0.2 and draft-27 in 15.1.0.3. While earlier drafts are available in Chrome Canary and other experimental browser builds, draft-27 is expected to see wide deployment across the internet. While we won’t support all drafts indefinitely going forward, our policy will be to support two drafts in any given maintenance release. For example, 15.1.0.2 supports both draft-24 and draft-25.
If you’re delivering HTTP applications, I hope you take a look at the cutting edge and give HTTP/3 a try! You can learn more about deploying HTTP/3 on BIG-IP on our support page at K60235402: Overview of the BIG-IP HTTP/3 and QUIC profiles.
-----[1] Despite rumors to the contrary, QUIC is not an acronym.
[2] F5 doesn’t yet support QUIC mobility features. We're still in the midst of rolling out improvements.