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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

I'd happily answer the first question, but your second question is flat out dumb.

Clever way of avoiding the question.

How do you see argo tunnel fit in this scope? It obviously has other features (cert management, internal routing) - but you'd have to keep competing against http standards with your protocol, no?

Argo Tunnel doesn't 'compete against web standards'. I'm really surprised that people are somehow claiming that Cloudflare is against the open web in some way when we've done so much to progress it (e.g. through early support for SPDY and HTTP/2 and now with QUIC including an open source QUIC implementation in Rust).

Argo Tunnel does a specific thing: make a connection from a client's server to Cloudflare (rather than the other way around). This is helpful from a scaling perspective (why have a load balancer when we can do it?) and a security perspective (no open ports). If there was a standard that did the same thing as Argo Tunnel we'd adopt it.

I didn't mean to imply that it is competing with open web standards; I apologize if it came out that way. I was trying to make the case that for instance performance benefits in http3 wouldn't apply to the connection that Argo maintains to origin since it is a different protocol and what your thoughts was on this.

Ah. That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.

We actually use standard protocols for the Argo Tunnel connection and we'd look at HTTP/3 as a possible mechanism for it. I agree that if there's a persistent connection the benefits of QUIC (and HTTP/2) are lessened compared to a browser doing a drive by on a web site. This is one reason the OP above is wrong about Cloudflare, HTTP/2 and Railgun.

Yes, the railgun comment was why I wanted to elaborate on the subject. Thanks for your insight.

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