On May 27 2021, the Internet Engineering Task Force published RFC 9000 - the standardarized version of the QUIC transport protocol. The QUIC Working G

QUIC Version 1 is live on Cloudflare

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2021-05-28 21:30:07

On May 27 2021, the Internet Engineering Task Force published RFC 9000 - the standardarized version of the QUIC transport protocol. The QUIC Working Group declared themselves done by issuing a Last Call 7 months ago. The i's have been dotted and the t's crossed, RFC 8999 - RFC 9002 are a suite of documents that capture years of engineering design and testing of QUIC. This marks a big occasion.

Transport protocols have a history of being hard to deploy on the Internet. QUIC overcomes this challenge by basing itself on top of UDP. Compared to TCP, QUIC has security by default, protecting almost all bytes from prying eyes or "helpful" middleboxes that can end up making things worse. It has designed-in features that speed up connection handshakes and mitigate the performance perils that can strike on networks that suffer loss or delays. It is pluggable, providing clear standardised extensions point that will allow smooth, iterative development and deployment of new features or performance enhancements for years to come.

The killer feature of QUIC, however, is that it is deployable in reality. We are excited to announce that QUIC version 1, RFC 9000, is available to all Cloudflare customers. We started with a limited beta in 2018, we made it general availability in 2019, and we've been tracking new document revisions every step of the way. In that time we've seen User-Agents like browsers join us in this merry march and prove that this thing works on the Internet.