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Video: The QUIC-ematic universe season 2020-2021 preview

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

QUIC is an encrypted transport protocol with better performance than HTTP and HTTP/2. While young, it’s already seeing some use in the larger internet companies who are learning how best to harness the optimisations. One of the stark differences is that it’s built on top of UDP rather than TCP. This is one of the main ways it increases efficiency. Freed from TCP’s constant acknowledgement of packets, QUIC also ensures reliable delivery but on its own terms which allows it to prioritise speedy delivery over acknowledgement admin. We’ve covered QUIC before, so if it’s new to you, check out this explainer as this talk is an update on what’s happened in 2020 and the plans for 2021 as QUIC aims to be standardised and much more available.

Lucas Pardue from Cloudflare works on the IETF working group devoted to QUIC and spoke at Demuxed 2020. “The IETF are standardisers” he says with QUIC being on its 31st draft with a move to standardise during 2021 what is called ‘IETF QUIC’ to differentiate from a slightly different version of QUIC from Google. IETF quick, Lucas outlines, delivers secure, reliable stream multiplexing.
 

 

QUIC actually forms a base layer for other applications like HTTP/3 with HTTP semantics to work on top of. Like most modern standards, QUIC is actually a name for more than one document. There is a transport layer, header compression, TLS handshake description and a document for recovery and loss protection. QUIC itself lives on UDP datagrams which is why one of the new options coming is to turn off some of the reliability which has been built on top of UDP to deliver TCP-like reliability for data which doesn’t really need it. One possibility here is running a QUIC tunnel where one QUIC connection actually has many QUIC streams within it. In this circumstance, you only want any one bit of data being protected by one reliable transmission mechanism. So you’d want to be turning off reliable transmission for your internal QUIC streams as they would be protected by the outer QUIC layer. There is a project called MASQUE which is working on this.

As with anything arriving on the market, it’s important to establish interoperability. We see this with the JT-NM and SRT plugfests. Lucas shows us the QUIC interop tester which automatically tests the latest implementations with each other and shows the results in a matrix plus allows access to logs and packet traces.

Lucas reminds us the QUIC streams are a first-class transport primitive providing reliable delivery. Within a stream, data will be delivered in order, but QUIC doesn’t specify how to schedule multiplexed streams. HTTP3 initially borrowed HTTP/2’s prioritisation scheme but found a better way to prioritise which is currently being discussed and finalised. Lucas has been working on quiche, Cloudflare’s own implementation of QUIC and shows a three-step process to getting quiche up and running.

Web Transport is another offering from QUIC which complements WebSocket which gives web apps better access to QUIC itself. The Chome Origin Trial explains how this is built in Chrome. Lucas talks about a test project he built on top of existing examples which is hosted at http3.wtf

Lucas ends by summarising the coming year: The working group is aiming to deliver documents to an IETF last call ahead of publication. The community will continue to get deployment experience as new users ar already working on enabling the technology and there is still work to be done on other adopted work items as well as considering others. Lucas ends by encouraging viewers to join in with the community,

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Speaker

Lucas Pardue Lucas Pardue
Senior Software Engineer, Cloudflare
Co-Chair of the QUIC working group, IETF

Video: Edge Compute

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Delivering personalised video at scale, live or otherwise, is a tradeoff between speed and complexity. In this lightning talk at Demuxed 2019, Kyle Boutette from Cloudflare explains the benefits of running code on the ‘edge’.

Kyle starts by highlighting the reason to use CDNs; they take the management of a whole fleet of servers off your hands allowing you to concentrate on delivering a video service and deploying the technology to do just that. This works really well and CDNs are the backbone of most of the large sites on the internet. Some companies build their own whilst some use Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront among the many CDNs out there. Apart from dealing with the admin of the servers, CDNs are careful to provide servers as close to your users as practical which helps in reducing latency.

The problem that Kyle exposes is that any personalisation needs to be done on the player itself or on the server. The former requiring implementing the same features on many platforms, the latter destroying the value of the CDN since it’s based on needing the central server(s) to calculate the new information and send it to the CDN bringing us back to square one.

The solution that Cloudflare has developed allows javascript to run on the the CDN’s computers, referred to as the ‘edge’. This allows much of the logic to be done close to the consumer and gives the highest chance of reusing CDN assets whilst also reducing the latency of the requests compared to talking to the central server infrastructure. Doing this with javascript provides a well-understood environment for web developers. Kyle provides examples to understand how this can be done with relatively simple code.

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Speaker

Kyle Boutette Kyle Boutette
Systems Engineer,
Cloudflare

Video: There and back again: reinventing UDP streaming with QUIC

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

QUIC is an encrypted transport protocol for increased performance compared to HTTP but will this help video streaming platforms? Often conflated with HTTP/3, QUIC is a UDP-based way evolution of HTTP/2 which, in turn, was a shake-up of the standard HTTP/1.1 delivery method of websites. HTTP/3 uses the same well-known security handshake from TLS 1.3 that is well adopted now in websites around the world to provide encryption by default. Importantly, it creates a connection between the two endpoints into which data streams are multiplexed. This prevents the need to constantly be negotiating new connections as found in HTTP/1.x so helping with speed and efficiency. These are known as QUIC streams.

QUIC streams provide reliable delivery, explains Lucas Pardue from Cloudflare, meaning it will recover packets when they are lost. Moreover, says Lucas, this is done in an extensible way with the standard specifying a basic model, but this is extensible. Indeed, the benefit of basing this technology on UDP is that changes can be done, programmatically, in user-space in lieu of the kernel changes that are typically needed for improved TCP handling on which HTTP/1.1, for example, is based.

QUIC hailed from a project of the same name created by Google which has been taken in by the IETF and, in the open community, honed and rounded into the QUIC we are hearing about today which is notably different from the original but maintaining the improvements proved in the first release. HTTP/3 is the syntax which is a development on from HTTP/2 which uses the QUIC transport protocol underneath or as Lucas would say, “HTTP/3 is the HTTP application mapping to the QUIC transport layer.” Lucas is heavily involved within the IETF effort to standardise HTTP/3 and QUIC so he continues in this talk to explain how QUIC streams are managed, identified and used.

It’s clear that QUIC and HTTP/3 are being carefully created to be tools for future, unforeseen applications with clear knowledge that they have wide applicability. For that reason, we are already seeing projects to add datagrams and RTP into the mix, to add multiparty or multicast. In many ways mimicking what we already have in our local networks. Putting them on QUIC can enable them to work on the internet and open up new ways of delivering streamed video.

The talk finishes with a nod to the fact that SRT and RIST also deliver many of the things QUIC delivers and Lucas leaves open the question of which will prosper in which segments of the broadcast market.

The Broadcast Knowledge has well over 500 talks/videos on many topics so to delve further into anything discussed above, just type into the search bar on the right. Or, for those who like URLs, just add your search query to the end of this URL https://thebroadcastknowledge.com/tag/.

Lucas has already written in detail about his work and what HTTP 3 is on his Cloudflare blog post.

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Speaker

Lucas Pardue Lucas Pardue
Senior Software Engineer,
Cloudflare