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better motivation for libp2p+HTTP #515

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Feb 14, 2023
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better motivation for libp2p+HTTP #515

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better motivation for libp2p+HTTP
marten-seemann Feb 13, 2023
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incorporate review feedback
marten-seemann Feb 14, 2023
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10 changes: 10 additions & 0 deletions http/README.md
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Expand Up @@ -19,6 +19,16 @@ At the same time, nodes that are already connected via a libp2p connection, will

Any protocol that follows request-response semantics can easily be mapped onto HTTP (mapping protocols that don’t follow a request-response flow can be more challenging). Protocols are encouraged to follow best practices for building REST APIs. Once a mapping has been defined, a single implementation can be used to serve both traditional libp2p as well as libp2p-HTTP clients.

Specifically, using libp2p+HTTP will allow:

1. Defining services / protocols once, and run them both via HTTP and via libp2p
1. Leverage libp2p's connectivity story (incl. hole punching) to run these services on both public nodes and on nodes behind NATs / firewall
1. Use existing peer and content discovery mechanisms to advertise HTTP-enabled multiaddresses, which can then be accessed either via plain HTTP(S) or via HTTP on top of libp2p
1. Support existing HTTP protocols like the S3 protocol. This would allow peers to fetch content seamlessly from an S3-compatible provider (S3, backblaze's B2, Cloudflare's R2)
1. Support edge compute directly. Many edge compute environments build on top of HTTP since it’s a stateless request/response protocol. This includes services such as Cloudflare workers, AWS Lambda, Netflify Edge functions, and many more.
1. Use peer authentication (both client and server auth) for a subset of HTTP endpoints

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1. Support existing HTTP protocols like the S3 protocol. This would allow peers to fetch content seamlessly from an S3-compatible provider (S3, backblaze's B2, Cloudflare's R2).

For example, I imagine us shipping the S3 protocol support as part of go-libp2p. Then the provider records could include something like /dns4/someS3Provider/https/s3/. A client will see that provider when doing a content route lookup, and then be able to get the data directly. This could be piped to some other function that will verify the content hash.

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This and the below point are the things I'm most excited about. Having edge DHT nodes would be really cool


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1. Support edge compute directly. Many edge compute environments build on top of HTTP since it's a stateless request/response protocol. This includes services such as Cloudflare workers, AWS Lambda, Netflify Edge functions, and many more.

## Addressing

Nodes may advertise HTTP multiaddresses to signal support for libp2p over HTTP. An address might look like this: `/ip4/1.2.3.4/tcp/443/tls/sni/example.com/http/p2p/<peer id>` (for HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2), or `/ip4/1.2.3.4/udp/443/quic/sni/example.com/http/p2p/<peer id>` (for HTTP/3).
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