Speedy SPDY

Last Friday, F5 posted on the DevCentral blog an article letting the world know that the WebAccelerator now provides drop-in SPDY support for any web or application server front-ended by a BigIP LTM:

F5 WebAccelerator now supports SPDY as a proxy for all the servers you choose to turn SPDY support on for. In the normal course of SPDY operations, the client and the server exchange information about whether they support SPDY or not, and if both do not, then HTTP is used for communication between the browser and the web server. BIG-IP WebAccelerator acts as a proxy for web servers. It terminates the connection, responds that the server behind it does indeed support SPDY, then translates requests from the browser into HTTP before passing them to the server, and responses from the server into SPDY before passing them to the client. The net result is that on the slowest part of the connection $mdash; the Internet and wireless device "last mile", SPDY is being used, while there are zero changes to the application infrastructure.

This is good news for F5 users and for shops looking to implement SPDY support into their infrastructure without the need to rollout a lot of additional infrastructure.