The impacts of market commoditisation in networking happen are occurring in more segments than just whitebox switches and network operating system. The Internet is steadily progressing towards the exclusive use of HTTP for all communication and bypasses the plethora of protocols that were once in use. And even within HTTP, the current direction of the HTTP/2 protocol standards and it’s proposed of TLS encryption for all protocols will radically change many aspects of the Internet.
Data delivered over an unencrypted channel is insecure, untrustworthy, and trivially intercepted. We owe it to our users to protect the security, privacy, and integrity of their data — all data must be encrypted while in flight and at rest. Historically, concerns over performance have been the common excuse to avoid these obligations, but today that is a false dichotomy. Let’s dispel some myths.
Ilya Gregorovich is a developer who has been working on new ways to improve the performance of web sites by focussing on IP protocols like TCP and HTTP. Protocols like SPDY have led to the proposal for HTTP/2 to use TLS encryption as standard to dramatically improve the security AND performance.
This website answers the questions as to why TLS can be faster and more secure that the current protocols in use today.
And I highly recommend reading the book, High Performance Browser Networking which changed many of my preconceptions about network performance and value in a web centric network.
Also, it should be noted that pervasive use of HTTP/2 will be a major reduction in the usefulness of QOS because traffic classification is limited on a encrypted protocol.
Note: I will also be touching on this topic in my Interop Session “WAN Optimization: Challenges and Options” where there are major changes in store for technologies that rely on protocol interception like WAN Accelerators, Proxy Servers, Traffic Shapers etc.