Today we've added support for HTTP/3 and 0-RTT across our entire website including all versions of our API. To explain why briefly, these technologies enable us to decrease access latency for establishing secure connections and the resumption of prior secure connections with dramatic results.

HTTP/3 (with QUIC) Explained

HTTP/3 is built using the QUIC protocol which uses UDP instead of TCP and through its ingenious implementation reduces the back and forth chatter between your client and the server you're requesting content from substantially.

Traditionally HTTP requests are initiated by a client sending a TCP SYN to a server which answers by sending back a TCP SYN + ACK then your client sends another ACK followed by a TLS request and a HTTP request which are replied to with a TLS setup response and a HTTP response.

HTTP/3 does away with most of this. Instead the connection is initiated by a client sending both a QUIC request and a HTTP Request simultaneously and receiving back a QUIC response and a HTTP response simultaneously. This reduces the back-and-forth required by traditional handshakes by an entire round-trip.

0-RTT Explained

While HTTP/3 with QUIC enables very fast initial connection establishment by removing an entire round-trip off the handshake process 0-RTT takes this a step further with connection resumption.

This is where those prior handshakes that were negotiated through HTTP/3 can be reused without renegotiation. And the way this works means your client can send a new request for API data in its very first round-trip to our servers.

Performance Implications

The end result is a much faster TTFB (Time to First Byte) and a fast conclusion to the entire API request followed by much lower latency for subsequent requests.

Latency is very important to us because it can be the determining factor in whether our API is deployed in a specific scenario or not. If our API is too slow for where it's needed we could lose a potential customer because of it.

And while we launch these new features today we're currently in the midst of an infrastructure upgrade that will bring improvements in the future too. This morning we deployed a new web server on one of our nodes (NYX) which offers us both new capabilities and opportunities for performance gains across our site and API. It also affords us tighter integration with our CDN (Content Delivery Network) by better matching their capabilities. To put it simply, there is more yet to come.

If you've been using HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 to access our API before now there is no need to worry as you still can. For those who already have or are willing to upgrade their clients to support HTTP/3 with QUIC we welcome you to do so, the latency benefits are too good to ignore especially if you're performing millions of requests to us on a regular basis.

That's all the updates we have for you today, thanks for reading and have a great week!