Compression & Encryption
Compression
The Spheron Edge Network executes two compression algorithms: gzip and brotli, to save bandwidth and make sites faster. Gzip has been around for quite some time, but brotli is a relatively new compression algorithm built by Google that best serves text compression. Moreover, Brotli is faster than gzip since it uses a dictionary of common keywords on both the client and server sides.
Encryption
Spheron serves every deployment over an HTTPS connection. The SSL certificates for these unique URLs are automatically generated free of charge. All HTTP requests to your deployments are automatically forwarded to HTTPS using the 308 status code with the following message:
HTTP/1.1 308 Moved Permanently Content-Type: text/plain Location: https://\<your-deployment-host>NOTE: You cannot disable this redirection or prevent the deployment from being served over HTTPS.
How are certificates handled?
OpenResty plugin generates SSL certificates on the go from Let's Encrypt (a free certificate authority) as requests are received.
It works like this:
- An SSL request for an SNI hostname is received.
- If the system already has an SSL certificate for that domain, it is immediately returned (with OCSP stapling).
- If the system does not yet have an SSL certificate for this domain, it issues a new SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt. Domain validation is handled for you. After receiving the new certificate (usually within a few seconds), the new certificate is saved, cached, and returned to the client (without dropping the original request).
It uses the ssl_certificate_by_lua functionality in OpenResty 1.9.7.2+.