Staying up to date with the latest protocols: SPDY/3.1

In June 2012, CloudFlare started a beta rollout of Google's SPDY protocol, which was designed to speed up web sites. Since then, the company has been closely monitoring the evolution of SPDY and its newer version QUIC. In August 2012, they rolled out SPDY for all their customers as a one-click configuration option. As of last week, CloudFlare has started using the latest version of SPDY, 3.1, which is supported by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. The key advantage of SPDY is its ability to multiplex many HTTP request streams onto a single TCP connection. In addition, they have also started experimenting with QUIC, a protocol that uses UDP as its underlying transport. CloudFlare plans to make QUIC available for their customers once it moves from experimental to beta status.