HTTP/3 and QUIC free for all customers | Fastly

We are proud to announce that HTTP/3 and QUIC deployments are now available for our entire customer base at no additional charge. 

Support for HTTP/3 on our edge cloud network helps companies provide a better digital experience for end users — most notably those on mobile devices or in parts of the world with spotty internet service — by enabling faster response times, better network performance, and built-in encryption with TLS 1.3. 

Through our Limited Availability program, we've done extensive testing of these deployments for our customers that speaks to the readiness of the technology. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, we saw:

• Total bytes delivered: 9.84 PB

• Average bytes delivered per day over HTTP/3: 109 TB

• Average requests per day over HTTP/3: 3.78 billion

“We are excited about Fastly's implementation of HTTP/3 over QUIC that will enable us to improve performance, specifically for our mobile users and users around the world, that may not have a great internet connection,” said Saikrishna Kotha, Senior Director of Global Network Services at PayPal. “We are looking forward to leveraging the power of QUIC combined with our great relationship with Fastly to make experiences better for all our users across the world.”

As companies continue to move toward building more complex web applications, processing secure traffic at high volumes, and addressing video latency, HTTP/3 and QUIC will help drive the future of the internet. Let’s dig in on how.

Technology to power innovation

QUIC, the technology behind HTTP/3, is a new latency-reducing, reliable, and secure internet transport protocol slated to replace TCP, the most commonly used transport today. We’ve talked before about how we love QUIC and are deeply invested in making it a success because it aligns with our mission to build a faster, more resilient, and more trusted internet. 

In fact, we believe so much in the promise of QUIC that our engineering team includes three core members of the group that built the protocol — Mark Nottingham, a chair of the QUIC working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); Kazuho Oku, a key contributor to the working group and author of quicly, our own implementation of this new protocol; and me, an editor of the core set of documents. 

In short, we’re so excited because the internet transport ecosystem has been growing less flexible for decades now, and QUIC breaks out of this ossification through encryption, versioning, and a much richer and more performant set of services. QUIC is poised to lead the charge on the next generation of internet innovations. This has already started to happen with extensions such as unreliable datagrams in QUIC — opening the door to real-time media and other applications that need less than fully reliable transport services — and with promising technologies such as MASQUE and WebTransport.

There are several key benefits that HTTP/3 and QUIC provide that address end user pain points as well as obstacles developers face in making the internet of tomorrow performant, resilient, and secure:

• Performance, security, and flexibility for the modern web: The benefits of HTTP/3 and QUIC are most evident for businesses that rely heavily on mobile users, or have customers in parts of the world with spotty internet connections.

• Deliver a better experience globally: Web traffic flows faster because it’s designed to avoid head-of-line blocking and offers a low-latency handshake that significantly reduces rebuffering.  

• Secure more with built-in encryption: TLS 1.3 — the latest version of the Transport Layer Security protocol — is built directly into QUIC. This design more effectively secures headers and metadata from third parties, ensuring more private, trustworthy connections than ever before.

• Integrate deeper to innovate faster: Because QUIC runs in user-space, it integrates seamlessly with our tooling, tracing, and logging infrastructure. This makes it easier for developers to run and learn from experiments, enabling more rapid deployment and evolution of sites and apps.

The internet of tomorrow

Building more resilient, performant, and secure digital experiences requires investment in every part of the internet ecosystem: architecture, products, and the very foundation upon which those applications run, the web itself. That means every builder has a crucial role to play. Technologists must build a healthier web. Vendors must build more durable, secure products. And the companies running websites and applications must fully embrace architectural evolution. 

How we build the web matters, and continuous evolution is necessary if we expect the internet to meet our needs in the coming years. We are proud to be at the forefront of not just rolling out but actually helping build that internet of the future.