Proxing WebSockets and SPDY

Introduction

YARP enables proxying WebSocket and SPDY connections by default. This support works with both the direct forwarding and full pipeline approaches.

WebSockets is a bidirectional streaming protocol built on HTTP/1.1.

SPDY is the precursor to HTTP/2 and is commonly used in Kubernetes environments.

Upgrades

WebSockets and SPDY are built on top of HTTP/1.1 using a feature called connection upgrades. YARP proxies the initial request, and if the destination server responds with 101 Switching Protocols, upgrades the connection to an opaque, bidirectional stream using the new protocol. YARP does not allow upgrading to other protocols like HTTP/2 this way.

HTTP/2

YARP and its underlying components (ASP.NET Core and HttpClient) do not support WebSockets over HTTP/2. Even if YARP is configured to proxy requests to the destination using HTTP/2, it will detect WebSocket and SPDY requests and use HTTP/1.1 to proxy them.

See https://github.com/microsoft/reverse-proxy/issues/1375 for future work here.