Dunia internet berevolusi sedikit demi sedikit. Capaian internet menjadi lebih pantas dengan kehadiran gentian fibre untuk menyampaikan maklumat. Namun begitu, walaupun perkakasan semakin canggih tetapi protokol internet yang digunakan tidak effisien. Ini juga merupakan faktor mengapa sebuah laman sesawang itu begitu perlahan walaupun kelajuan capaian internet semakin laju. Gambar dibawah sebagai contoh perbezaan antara HTTP1.1 dan HTTP2.
Apa itu Quic : Sejarah
Quic atau projek quiche merupakan idea dari Google untuk memberikan capaian lebih pantas menggunakan protokol UDP. Ya, UDP. Quic atau “quick udp internet connections” dikatakan dapat menyelesaikan masalah “latency” TCP. Mungkin inilah punca bacaan TTFB tinggi, entahlah.
” QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections, pronounced quick) is an experimental transport layer network protocol designed by Google. The overall goal is to reduce latency compared to that of TCP. Think of QUIC as being similar to TCP+TLS+HTTP/2 implemented on UDP. Because TCP is implemented at the lowest levels of machinery (operating systems, routing firmware), making changes to TCP is next to impossible given the amount of upgrades that would need to occur. Since QUIC is built on top of UDP, it suffers from no such limitations and can be integrated into end host applications.
Currently a client-side implementation exists as a part of Chromium and Android, and it is used when accessing a server side application that supports it (e.g. Google docs and drive, YouTube, etc.). Estimates are that 88% of traffic for Android and Chrome Desktop is now based on QUIC, and that interactions with Google backends can result in 5% performance improvement, and 30% less rebuffering of streaming applications. In practice the use of this protocol can offer speedups at the browser level, but the primary use case is home uses with connection speeds that are measured in the 100s of Mbps range. ” – Fasterdata
Apa itu Quic : Server
Sehingga penulisan ini, hanya server Litespeed sahaja yang menyokong protokol Quic. Manakala NGINX masih dalam peringkat percubaan. Yang terbaru, Cloudflare telah mengeluarkan entri implementasi Quic pada NGINX. Malangnya eksperimen ini menggunakan NGINX versi 1.6. Manakala, Apache tiada info lagi. Lanjut Cloudflare Nginx Quic Experiment
Apa itu Quic : Cabaran dan Risiko
Menurut Fastvue, terdapat beberapa risiko jika menggunakan protokol Quic ini. Selain dari kelebihan Quic, risiko seperti laman sesawang kita mungkin akan dihalang oleh Firewall kerana menggunakan UDP.
” The issue is not with the protocol or the technology itself. The supposed upside of QUIC is that it makes web communications more efficient and faster. The problem is that it is not supported by security appliances such as firewalls yet, and has therefore inadvertently created a security hole for many organizations.
Most firewalls have extensive functionality when dealing with HTTP and HTTPS traffic. In most architectures, when HTTP traffic is detected, it is passed on to a web protection module that performs web filtering, deep packet inspection etc. HTTP traffic gets special treatment because the firewalls can interpret the traffic from Layer4 up to layer 7. This special treatment includes malware scanning and in most cases, enhanced reporting.
QUIC uses the traditional HTTP ports of 80 and 443 but that is where the similarities end. The supporting browsers and servers support this new protocol and are able to process it as web traffic, but the network device in between cannot determine the application protocol and switches to treating it like any generic layer 4 UDP traffic.” – Fastvue