Cloudflare AKE cuts origin HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7%

Cloudflare has introduced Automatic Key Exchange (AKE) for Origins, a feature that reduces the number of origin HelloRetryRequests by 52% to 3.7%. This feature is available for Cloudflare customers using HTTP/3 and supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. AKE is designed to improve the efficiency and performance of HTTPS connections. It achieves this by allowing the server to send the initial TLS handshake message and the client to respond with the TLS key exchange message in a single round trip. This eliminates the need for the client to send a separate HelloRetryRequest, which was previously required for HTTP/3 connections. As a result, AKE can reduce the latency and overhead of HTTPS connections, making them faster and more reliable. Cloudflare has reported that AKE has already shown significant improvements in performance and has been deployed across a large number of its customers.