I don’t know if you’ve heard or not, but TCP no more. It has ceased to be, bereft of life, and rests in peace. It has kicked the bucket, popped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed its last, and gone to meet the great protocol in the sky. That might be a bit over the top but if I counted the number of times people told me TCP was dead I would need to have a degree in accounting.
TCP is old for sure. It’s doesn’t fit the bill for things we use today like web browsing connections. It’s definitely not optimized for cloud data transfers. But it’s also the best thing we have to solve a lot of the challenges we face in connectivity that aren’t in a web browser or an Amazon data center. For all the hate that TCP gets from people that want to refactor every protocol it still works. Not only that, but it works really well compared to the alternatives once you get outside of their niche.
In this episode over Tomversations we take a look at TCP and the alternatives and figure out whether or not we need to have John Cleese eulogize TCP.
Show Notes and Links
- Reddit thread on TCP/IP Alternatives
- SNIA Primer on QUIC
- TCP/IP Alternatives
- Wikipedia entry on QUIC
- Excellent overview video of TCP, UDP, and QUIC
- QUIC becomes a standard
- More QUIC info
- It’s time to replace TCP in the data center
- Initial Amazon announcement of SRD
- Amazon blog post about the need for SRD
