Bringing HTTP/3 To gRPC at Cloudflare Scale
summary
Cloudflare describes multi‑year work to run gRPC over HTTP/3 at edge scale, shipping early HTTP/3 support in 2018, open sourcing the quiche Rust library in 2019 and the testing tool h3i in 2024. Implementation uses a gRPC‑Web conversion layer to bridge a legacy proxy chain, required H2 mitigations (ping‑flood, rapid‑reset), and added H3 backends. Lab tests show ~1 RTT median savings and P90 cases up to ~5 RTTs; customer P75/P95 latency and success rates improve with H3.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:57HTTP/3 and gRPC at scale
- 10:17QUIC and HTTP/3 timeline
- 12:43Cloudflare’s QUIC/HTTP/3 implementation
- 15:32gRPC HTTP/2 support at Cloudflare
- 17:40HTTP/2 problems vs HTTP/3
- 19:26gRPC over HTTP/3 support & gains
- 26:08gRPC over HTTP/3 latency results
- 28:15QUIC streams future
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