Understand key network protocol vocabulary: TCP vs. UDP trade-offs, HTTP/2 vs. HTTP/3 (QUIC), TLS handshake, WebSockets, and gRPC over HTTP/2.
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The primary trade-off between TCP and UDP is:
TCP's reliability mechanisms (SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK handshake, sequence numbers, acknowledgements, retransmission) add overhead. UDP skips all this — suitable for real-time applications (video calls, gaming, DNS) where speed matters more than guaranteed delivery.
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HTTP/3 uses QUIC instead of TCP as its transport. The main benefit is:
HTTP/2 over TCP still suffers from head-of-line blocking at the TCP layer — a lost packet stalls all multiplexed streams. QUIC implements multiplexing at the transport level so each stream is independent. QUIC also combines the transport and TLS 1.3 handshake, reducing connection setup to 0-RTT or 1-RTT.
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During a TLS handshake, the term 'cipher suite' refers to:
An example cipher suite: TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (TLS 1.3). It specifies: key exchange (ECDHE), authentication (RSA/ECDSA), bulk cipher (AES-256-GCM), and MAC (SHA-384). TLS 1.3 reduced the list to a few strong suites and removed weak algorithms like RC4 and 3DES.
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WebSockets differ from standard HTTP requests in that:
After the WebSocket upgrade handshake (an HTTP Upgrade request), both client and server can send frames at any time. This enables real-time applications (chat, live dashboards, multiplayer games) without the overhead of repeated HTTP request-response cycles.
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gRPC uses Protocol Buffers (protobuf) over HTTP/2. The advantage over REST/JSON is:
Protobuf binary payloads are typically 3-10x smaller than equivalent JSON. HTTP/2 multiplexing means thousands of concurrent RPC calls share one connection. The .proto IDL auto-generates type-safe clients in many languages, reducing integration errors compared to untyped REST.