HTTP/3 Adoption is Driving Huge Gains for Microsoft

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Technology Insights, Internet Society
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October 14, 2021

One of the ‘enabling’ technologies that we track on Internet Society Pulse is the latest version of the protocol that underpins the web, namely HTTP/3. In addition to powering the web, HTTP is increasingly used to transfer data between Internet-connected devices of all kinds.

In a recent Technical community update, Nick Banks highlighted the huge gains that deployment of HTTP/3 is driving for Microsoft Exchange Online. Microsoft have started deploying their recently released Windows Server 2022 and have enabled HTTP/3 on 20% of the front-end server capacity for outlook.office.com. They are now serving around 50,000 requests per second over HTTP/3.

HTTP/3 is built on the new transport protocol QUIC that was designed explicitly to improve performance and security for the applications that adopt it. The performance benefits of HTTP/3 are clear in the data shared in Nick’s article — they are seeing over 60% reduction in request latency for the worst performing flows. Even previously well-behaved flows are seeing reductions in latency of nearly 10% and given how important responsiveness is for cloud-based applications in general, these gains are important.

As Nick notes, “HTTP/3 [is] proving huge gains in responsiveness for Microsoft 365!”

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash