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by baybal2 1593 days ago
HTTP/3 will not be adopted because it's a downgrade from HTTP/2 for CDN companies.

HTTP/2 has indeed massively benefitted CDNs by providing more effective capacity per buck, but UDP based 3.0/QUIC will singlehandedly destroy it, and bring it to below HTTP 1.1.

3 comments

Major CDNs seem to be adopting HTTP/3 just fine:

Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/http3-the-past-present-and-futur...

Akamai: https://developer.akamai.com/blog/2020/04/14/quick-introduct...

Fastly: https://www.fastly.com/blog/why-fastly-loves-quic-http3

Not to mention Google, which uses it a lot for regular pages and for content (eg: YouTube video).

Adoption client-side also seems to be moving quickly too. I looked at the stats for 2 of my sites and HTTP/3 is now at 60-70%, with HTTP/2 having dropped to 25-30% already.

Good for them, when they have money to spend on servers. Budget CDNs are much less happy.
That might be the case, but HTTP/3 is supported by most major CDNs and browsers. It has been adopted already.

Also, if this blog post from 2020 is correct, performance per buck isn't that bad with some teaks: https://www.fastly.com/blog/measuring-quic-vs-tcp-computatio...

I assume things have evolved since 2020.

Could you give an eli5 as to why that's the case? Or are you just throwing out a proclamation?
The solution to that is QUIC over IP, i.e. removing UDP from the stack.