Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http-00.txt

Hello folks,

Tommy Pauly, Martin Thomson, and I have submitted a new I-D, titled
“Incremental HTTP Messages.”

The draft can be found at the following locations, but please let me
introduce the draft.
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http/
*
https://kazuho.github.io/draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http/draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http.html


This draft defines the “Incremental” HTTP header field, which allows
senders of HTTP messages to request that intermediaries forward portions of
the HTTP message body as they arrive, instead of buffering the entire
message before forwarding.

The goal is to reduce friction between endpoints running applications that
want incremental delivery and intermediaries that tend to buffer messages.

As you may know, several HTTP applications expect incremental delivery,
including those mentioned in the draft (Server-Sent Events and Chunked
OHTTP). These applications often don’t work as intended when intermediaries
are involved, as intermediaries frequently buffer entire requests or
responses before forwarding them downstream.

It’s worth noting that intermediaries may have good reasons for this
behavior. For example, reverse proxies tend to buffer entire requests [1]
to reduce request concurrency on application servers behind them (as a
defense against the Slowloris attack).

Currently, the only way to address this issue is by manually configuring
intermediaries to forward HTTP message bodies incrementally - this must be
done per intermediary instance, per origin, or even per URI.

This approach is tedious, unreliable, and doesn’t scale.

Hence, our proposal.

Endpoints sending HTTP messages can include the Incremental header field to
indicate that they want incremental delivery. Intermediaries can check for
this header and, if present, either forward the message incrementally or
reject it.

Because the Incremental header field acts as a signal on a per-HTTP message
basis, intermediaries can still buffer ordinary HTTP messages to minimize
downstream concurrency, while forwarding messages incrementally when
requested.

This way, we can eliminate the need for configuring intermediaries for each
deployment.

In short, the introduction of the Incremental HTTP header field eliminates
the need of configuring intermediaries to support incremental delivery,
achieves better interoperability, and improves security.

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Thank you in advance.

PS. The observations and opinions expressed in this email are my own and
haven’t been reviewed by my coauthors.

[1] Nginx by default buffers the entire request; see
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#proxy_request_buffering

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: <internet-drafts@ietf.org>
Date: 2024年10月15日(火) 21:32
Subject: New Version Notification for
draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http-00.txt
To: 奥 一穂 <kazuhooku@gmail.com>, Martin Thomson <mt@lowentropy.net>, Tommy
Pauly <tpauly@apple.com>


A new version of Internet-Draft draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http-00.txt
has been successfully submitted by Kazuho Oku and posted to the
IETF repository.

Name:     draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http
Revision: 00
Title:    Incremental HTTP Messages
Date:     2024-10-15
Group:    Individual Submission
Pages:    6
URL:
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http-00.txt
Status:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http/
HTML:
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http-00.html
HTMLized:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http


Abstract:

   This document specifies the "Incremental" HTTP header field, which
   instructs HTTP intermediaries to forward the HTTP message
   incrementally.

Discussion Venues

   This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.

   Discussion of this document takes place on the HTTP Working Group
   mailing list (ietf-http-wg@w3.org), which is archived at
   https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/.

   Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
   https://github.com/kazuho/draft-kazuho-httpbis-incremental-http.



The IETF Secretariat




-- 
Kazuho Oku