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HTTP/2 Support in Azure Content Delivery Network

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HTTP/2 is a major revision to HTTP/1.1. This technology delivers enhanced web performance, diminished response time, and an elevated user experience, all the while preserving the customary HTTP methods, status codes, and semantics. Though HTTP/2 is designed to work with HTTP and HTTPS, many client web browsers only support HTTP/2 over TLS (Transport Layer Security).

HTTP/2 Benefits

The benefits of HTTP/2 include:

  • Multiplexing and concurrency

    Using HTTP 1.1, making multiple resource requests requires multiple TCP connections, and each connection has performance overhead associated with it. HTTP/2 allows multiple resources to be requested on a single TCP connection.

  • Header compression

    By compressing the HTTP headers for served resources, time on the wire is reduced significantly.

  • Stream dependencies

    Stream dependencies allow the client to indicate to the server which resources have priority.

HTTP/2 Browser Support

All major browsers implement HTTP/2 support in their current versions. Browsers that don't support it automatically falls back to HTTP/1.1.

Browser Minimum Version
Microsoft Edge 12
Google Chrome 43
Mozilla Firefox 38
Opera 32
Safari 9

Enabling HTTP/2 Support in Azure CDN

Currently, HTTP/2 support is active for all Azure CDN profiles. No further action is required from customers.

Next Steps

To learn more about HTTP/2, visit the following resources:

To learn more about Azure CDN's available features, see the Azure CDN Overview.