We are pleased to announce HTTP/2 is now available for all customers with Azure CDN from Akamai. This feature is on by default, all existing and new Akamai standard profiles (enabling from Azure portal) can benefit from it with no additional cost.
HTTP/2 is designed to improve webpage loading speed and optimize user experience. All major web browsers already support HTTP/2 today. Though this protocol is designed to work with HTTP and HTTPS, most of the browsers only support HTTP/2 over TLS.
Key HTTP/2 benefits include:
- Multiplexing and concurrency: Allow multiple requests sent on the same TCP connection
- Header compression: Reduce header size for faster transfer time
- Stream prioritization and dependencies: Prioritize resources to transfer important data first
- Server push (not supported currently): Allow server to “push” responses proactively into client caches
Next steps
We'll work on HTTP2 support for Azure CDN from Verizon in the next few months.
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Is there a feature you'd like to see in Azure CDN? Give us feedback.