Introducing HTTP/2 and gRPC support

Today we are very excited to announce end-to-end HTTP/2 and gRPC support. This further extends the advanced networking capabilities that can be deployed and configured on Northflank. We have historically upgraded HTTP/1 traffic to HTTP/2 at the edge load-balancer, downgrading it to HTTP/1 as it reached your workload, with the primary focus of improving performance and request efficiency. Now, you can make full use of HTTP/2 benefits in your web and microservices as traffic will now continue to flow upstream to your web server for processing as HTTP/2.

HTTP/2 and gPRC on Northflank

• Allows using advanced features such a gRPC on your services
• Additional protocol can now be selected during port configuration for both private and public ports
• The platform will continue to upgrade all incoming traffic to HTTP/2 and downgrade if the workload doesn’t support it
• Existing HTTP ports will remain on HTTP/1 but can be switched by the user
• You can still configure multiple HTTP/1, HTTP/2, TCP and UDP ports per service

Benefits of HTTP/2 and use-cases

• Reduce latency by enabling full request and response multiplexing
• Minimise protocol overhead via efficient compression of HTTP header fields
• Add support for request prioritisation and server push

Benefits of gRPC and use-cases

• designed for low latency and high throughput communication. gRPC is great for lightweight microservices where efficiency is critical
• excellent support for bi-directional streaming. gRPC services can push messages in real-time without polling

Features & fixes:

• Reduced the frequency of sudo mode password prompts when editing environment data
• Updated the “Getting started” documentations pages to reflect recent changes
• Fixed an issue where an addon could get into an unhealthy state when a disk restore applied an old version of the addon
• Various minor API example payload & schema improvements