Re: Proxy User Stories

On 2013-12-10 10:40, Martin Thomson wrote:
> On 9 December 2013 13:31, Amos Jeffries wrote:
>> * "Just use HTTP/1" is the worst of undesirables. Limited/slow 
>> bandwidth and
>> CPU already pressures heavy erasure of HTTP/1 meta data and content
>> compression at the edges.
> 
> My answer was going to be "just use IP".
> 
> The reason I noted this was it wasn't clear (to me at least) why
> routers need access to application-layer data.  Can you expand a
> little more on this?

The node/gateway access to Internet depends on more than simply the IP 
level route being up/down. Those darn per-user rules get in the way. 
Relaying on messages to the nearest alternative gateway if their 
Internet access is down or not permitted is necessary based on 
application-layer classification.

Also (at present) the gateway emitting the message to Internet needs to 
be able to reconstruct enough elided HTTP headers for Internet systems 
to accept it (adding faked User-Agent, conversion from Secure-HTTP to 
HTTPS etc). I am hoping HTTP/2 can remove the need to erase those in the 
first place but one never knows.

HTTP is one of the relative few protocols which provide a triple 
benefits of; TCP reliability, proxies to re-route stateless messages, 
and wide compatibility with the Internet as a whole. IP is already used 
as the underlying L2 transport and UDP as much as possible where 
reliability and timeliness have low importance.

Amos

Received on Monday, 9 December 2013 22:09:45 UTC