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I read in Cloudflares support pages they convert the traffic from HTTP2 to HTTP/1.x when sending the requests forward to our internal proxies.

We have a Cloudflare WAF service, which send the traffic forward to our data center internal WAF, and this WAF sends the traffic forward to our nginx, which is basically proxies the requests to our internal services.

Now our WAF and nginx support HTTP2 protocol, but we noted that when requests come from Cloudflares side, they are converted to HTTP/1.x since according to them there is no point forwarding the traffic using the same HTTP2, because HTTP2 is focused on improving the browser behavior only.

I am not sure if we really don't need the traffic to be sent to all proxies using the same HTTP2. Can anyone shed some light on this topic?

Tim
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Mher Harutyunyan
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1 Answers1

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HTTP/2 improves preference by addressing inefficiencies in the protocol by adding a binary, multiplexing framing layer to address the head of line blocking issue naturally inherent in earlier versions of the HTTP protocol. These mostly affect high latency, low bandwidth connections - i.e. browser to edge node.

For CDN to origin server this is typically less of an issue, especially if caching at the CDN side so the origin server should be hit less.

More extensive answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41637076/http2-with-node-js-behind-nginx-proxy

Or if really interested in the subject then I’ve written a book on the topic (available in early access now but due to be published shortly): https://www.manning.com/books/http2-in-action

Barry Pollard
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