Full HTTP/2 support is available across all Progress Kemp Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and can be enabled at the push of a button. Progress Kemp's HTTP/2 support greatly improves user experience on applications and websites, simplifying the performance upgrade path for site administrators.

HTTP/2 is the latest version of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and is designed to optimize the delivery of content on everything from websites to mobile apps leading to a much better end user experience. It is supported across modern browsers including the latest versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Edge.

HTTP/2 has huge potential. There are a number of inflexibility, inefficiency and performance challenges with HTTP/1 that are solved by HTTP/2. Several of the benefits of HTTP/2 are below:

  • Multiplexing and concurrency: Several requests can be sent in rapid succession in the same TCP connection. Responses can be received out of order – eliminating the need for multiple connections between the client and the server.
  • Stream dependencies: The client can indicate to the server which of the resources are more important than others
  • Header compression: HTTP header size is drastically reduced
  • Server push: The server can send resources that the client has not yet requested

The LoadMaster also supports HTTP/2 – the LoadMaster can convert HTTP/2 traffic to HTTP/1.1 traffic in the back-end before it hits the Real Servers. These Real Servers do not need to have SSL enabled.

The HTTP/2 functionality in the LoadMaster provides optimizations, such as request pipelining and request multiplexing to reduce the request load on back-end servers. This results in a significantly improved end user experience when using a browser with HTTP/2 support. HTTP/2 works with a number of LoadMaster features, such as content switching, content caching, advanced persistence, header injection and the Web Application Firewall (WAF).