Amazon CloudFront now supports HTTP/3 powered by QUIC
Amazon CloudFront now supports HTTP version 3 (HTTP/3) requests over QUIC for end user connections. HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a user datagram protocol (UDP) based, stream-multiplexed, secure transport protocol that combines and improves upon the capabilities of existing transmission control protocol (TCP), TLS, and HTTP/2. HTTP/3 offers several benefits over previous HTTP versions, including faster response times and enhanced security.
Amazon CloudFront now supports HTTP version 3 (HTTP/3) requests over QUIC for end user connections. HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a user datagram protocol (UDP) based, stream-multiplexed, secure transport protocol that combines and improves upon the capabilities of existing transmission control protocol (TCP), TLS, and HTTP/2. HTTP/3 offers several benefits over previous HTTP versions, including faster response times and enhanced security.
Customers are constantly looking to deliver faster and more secure applications to their users. As internet penetration increases globally and more users come online via mobile and from remote networks, the need for improved performance and reliability is greater than ever. HTTP/3 is an improvement over previous HTTP versions, and helps customers improve performance and end-viewer experience by reducing connection times and eliminating head of line blocking. CloudFront's HTTP/3 support is built on top of s2n-quic, a new open-source QUIC protocol implementation in Rust, with a strong emphasis on efficiency and performance. CloudFront’s HTTP/3 implementation supports client-side connection migrations, allowing client applications to recover connections that are experiencing problematic events such as Wifi to cellular migration or persistent packet loss, with minimal or no interruption. Additionally, HTTP/3 provides enhanced security as it uses QUIC which encrypts the TLS handshake packets by default. CloudFront customers that have enabled HTTP/3 on their distributions have seen up to 10% improvement in time to first byte, and up to 15% improvement in page load times. Customers have also observed reliability improvements as handshake failures reduced when they enabled HTTP/3 on their distributions.
To enable HTTP/3 on your distributions, you can edit the distribution configuration through the CloudFront Console, the UpdateDistribution API action, or using a CloudFormation template. Clients that do not support HTTP/3 can still communicate with HTTP/3 enabled Amazon CloudFront distributions using previous HTTP versions.
HTTP/3 is now available on all 410+ CloudFront edge locations worldwide and there is no additional charge for using this feature. To learn more about Amazon CloudFront HTTP/3, refer the CloudFront Developer Guide. To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, visit the Amazon CloudFront product page.