HTTP/2 Support in Azure CDN

HTTP/2 is a major revision to HTTP/1.1. It provides faster web performance, reduced response time, and improved user experience, while maintaining the familiar HTTP methods, status codes, and semantics. Though HTTP/2 is designed to work with HTTP and HTTPS, many client web browsers only support HTTP/2 over TLS.

HTTP/2 Benefits

The benefits of HTTP/2 include:

• Multiplexing and concurrency

  Using HTTP 1.1, making multiple resource requests requires multiple TCP connections, and each connection has performance overhead associated with it. HTTP/2 allows multiple resources to be requested on a single TCP connection.

• Header compression

  By compressing the HTTP headers for served resources, time on the wire is reduced significantly.

• Stream dependencies

  Stream dependencies allow the client to indicate to the server which resources have priority.

HTTP/2 Browser Support

All of the major browsers have implemented HTTP/2 support in their current versions. Non-supported browsers automatically fall back to HTTP/1.1.

Browser	Minimum Version
Microsoft Edge	12
Google Chrome	43
Mozilla Firefox	38
Opera	32
Safari	9

Enabling HTTP/2 Support in Azure CDN

Currently, HTTP/2 support is active for all Azure CDN profiles. No further action is required from customers.

Next Steps

To see the benefits of HTTP/2 in action, see this demo from Akamai.

To learn more about HTTP/2, visit the following resources:

• HTTP/2 specification homepage
• Official HTTP/2 FAQ
• Akamai HTTP/2 information

To learn more about Azure CDN's available features, see the Azure CDN Overview.