> It completely ignores that the "port number" abstraction for service identification has completely failed due to the industry glomming onto HTTP as some sort of universal tunnel encapsulation for all application-layer protocols. And then there's all the non-backend problems!
The paper argues the in '3.1 Stream orientation' section, that stream orientation is a problem for TCP, and says that most apps send messages instead, and the better protocol should handle messages, natively, etc. Which is a good point I think.
But back to TCP. What do you do, if you need to send Messages between applications in TCP? Preferably those Messages would be encrypted also.
You could make up your own protocol, but you probably would rather not! So you use something that is readily available, and does messages, encryption, etc. Would be nice if there were also a ready to use load balancers, caches, tools to debug it, etc
Now, what would be such a protocol.
Why HTTPS, of course.
So I kind of think that the lack of a low level Message Protocol has lead us, as an industry, to coalesce these features bit-by-bit on top of HTTP. It's not perfect by any means, but it does the job.
HTTPS adds a tremendous amount of overhead to give you messaging. It's a lot better from a hyperscaler's perspective to replace TCP and not use the byte stream abstraction. After all, networks send messages. It's silly to throw that away at one layer and try to get it back at the next layer.
The paper argues the in '3.1 Stream orientation' section, that stream orientation is a problem for TCP, and says that most apps send messages instead, and the better protocol should handle messages, natively, etc. Which is a good point I think.
But back to TCP. What do you do, if you need to send Messages between applications in TCP? Preferably those Messages would be encrypted also.
You could make up your own protocol, but you probably would rather not! So you use something that is readily available, and does messages, encryption, etc. Would be nice if there were also a ready to use load balancers, caches, tools to debug it, etc
Now, what would be such a protocol.
Why HTTPS, of course.
So I kind of think that the lack of a low level Message Protocol has lead us, as an industry, to coalesce these features bit-by-bit on top of HTTP. It's not perfect by any means, but it does the job.