Amazon CloudFront now supports HTTP/2

Posted On: Sep 7, 2016

We are pleased to announce that you can now enable HTTP/2 for your Amazon CloudFront distributions to improve the performance of your web content delivered to clients that support the new HTTP/2 protocol. 

HTTP/2 is a major revision of the HTTP protocol. This new version has several features that make page loading and rendering faster. 

  • Multiplexing allows multiple requests and response messages between the client and Amazon CloudFront to be in flight at the same time over a single connection, instead of multiple connections, which improves page load times.
  • Header compression reduces the overhead bytes downloaded by the client, helping get the content to the viewer sooner. This is especially useful for mobile clients that are already constrained on bandwidth.
  • Stream priority, allows for quicker page rendering by enabling the client to control the order in which web assets are delivered, thereby optimizing user experience. 

HTTP/2 is enabled by default for all new Amazon CloudFront distributions, and for existing distributions HTTP/2 can be enabled by editing the distribution configuration. There is no additional charge for using this feature, and clients that do not support HTTP/2 will still be able to communicate with HTTP/2-Enabled Amazon CloudFront distributions using HTTP/1.1. 

To learn more about HTTP/2 support in Amazon CloudFront, see:

To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, see the Amazon CloudFront product page.  

We also invite you to join our monthly office hours where Amazon CloudFront engineers will be available to answer questions and share best practices. Monthly office hours occur on the LAST Tuesday of the month. The September office hours will be on Tuesday, September 27, 2016, 10:00AM PDT and you can register here.