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Re: Working Group Last Call: Incremental HTTP Messages (lists.w3.org)
2 points by Jakob 1 day ago
1 comments

Submitted, because I just found out that even after 28 years, the definition of "upstream" and "downstream" is still heavily contested.

> Umm, no. Fix the Envoy proxy terminology so that it isn't obviously wrong.

The posters interpretation of why Envoy is using downstream on listener side and upstream on backend side is wrong. There's a formal definition in RFC 2616:

  upstream/downstream
    Upstream and downstream describe the flow of a message: all messages flow from upstream to downstream.
Now HTTP is obviously bi-directional but since for most reverse proxy usecases responses far outweigh the requests upstream means "the backend"