datagram VS quiche

It’s too early to predict what WebTransport will be used for, but the first teams to use it have every chance to build something groundbreaking.

Background: I wanted a secured UDP network for some of my devices (before I knew of WireGuard®) but could not find one that I can customize to support sending unreliable data (e.g. video stream) (before I knew of Datagram extension). quic-go was hard to compile last time I tried and I couldn't use/extend its QUIC APIs as they are under "internal" package. Others I found require C/C++ libraries which are difficult to cross-compile. I really like quiche APIs and even tried its C bindings but, you know, Cgo is not Go.

What do you find hard about setting up a WebRTC server? I hear from users they are able to spin up a Pion DataChannel server in 5 mins (including installing Go)

WebTransport isn’t going to be here soon though, I would be cautious in investing. Stuff like Congestion Control is still a big unknown [0] and we don’t have Datagrams everywhere.

[0] https://github.com/w3c/webtransport/issues/168

[1] https://github.com/quicwg/datagram

The title of this post puts emphasis on "written in C", making me wonder when this would ever be a desirable feature, given that more secure implementations are available, and can be integrated into old C projects just as easily.

No need to rewrite everything from the ground up: https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche#curl

The issue is dead silent too!

https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche/issues/1115

Even though Oxy is a proprietary project, we try to give back some love to the open-source community without which the project wouldn’t be possible by open-sourcing some of the building blocks such as https://github.com/cloudflare/boring and https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche.

They’ve been on the Rust train since at least 2019. Just look at projects like quiche, wrangler, and boringtun

It's more like Cloudflare forked nginx a long time ago, and is meanwhile in the very slow (like, decade-long) process of replacing it entirely.

The Cloudflare Workers Runtime, for instance, is built directly around V8; it does not use nginx or any other existing web server stack. Many new features of Cloudflare are in turn built on Workers, and much of the old stack build on nginx is gradually being migrated to Workers. https://workers.dev https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

In another part of the stack, there is Pingora, another built-from-scratch web server focused on high-performance proxying and caching: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-t...

Even when using nginx, Cloudflare has rewritten or added big chunks of code, such as implementing HTTP/3: https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche And of course there is a ton of business logic written in Lua on top of that nginx base.

Though arguably, Cloudflare's biggest piece of magic is the layer 3 network. It's so magical that people don't even think about it, it just works. Seamlessly balancing traffic across hundreds of locations without even varying IP addresses is, well, not easy.

I could go on... automatic SSL provisioning? DDoS protection? etc. These aren't nginx features.

So while Cloudflare may have gotten started being more-or-less nginx-as-a-service I don't think you can really call it that anymore.

(I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers.)

Ask Cloudflare why they use HTTP/3 and QUIC https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche.

Cloudflare has used rust for multiple projects in the past such as their QUIC/HTTP3 implementation Quiche and a WireGuard implementation BoringTun.