ESA speed and network Overview - Edge Security Acceleration

Alibaba Cloud Edge Security Acceleration (ESA) offers two methods to improve website performance: speed optimization and network optimization. Speed optimization focuses on image transformations, file compression, and protocol optimization. Network optimization supports IPv6, WebSocket, gRPC, and the configuration of file upload size limits to enhance website performance in various scenarios.

Feature introduction

Method	Feature	Description
Speed optimization	Image transformations	In various business contexts, you may need to resize, crop, rotate, or compress images from content sharing websites. However, initiating an origin request for each image processing task can substantially increase the number of origin requests and the cache size on points of presence (POPs). To address these challenges, ESA provides the image transformations feature. You can directly convert images based on your business requirements on ESA POPs. ESA also caches the converted images on POPs. This accelerates content retrieval and reduces origin traffic.
	Gzip compression	If you enable the Gzip compression feature, ESA POPs return Gzip-compressed files to clients. This reduces the file size, speeds up file transmission, and improves bandwidth utilization.
	Brotli compression	Brotli is a new open source compression algorithm, which has better performance than Gzip. After you enable the Brotli compression, ESA POPs compress resources before the resources are returned to clients. This reduces file sizes, accelerates file distribution, and reduces bandwidth consumption.
	Protocol optimization	If you enable the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) feature and correctly configure the required certificate for your website, ESA automatically turns on the HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC) switches to allow you to use the HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocols.
Network optimization	IPv6	IPv6 is introduced to solve the pain point of IPv4 address exhaustion, which hinders Internet development. ESA is dedicated to the robust and sustainable development of Internet technologies. To this end, ESA enables the IPv6 feature for all websites free of charge. You can use IPv4 or IPv6 addresses to access networks based on your business requirements. After you enable IPv6, IPv6 clients can access ESA over IPv6. When ESA accesses the origin server, ESA carries the IPv6 information.
	WebSocket	If you want your origin server to allow WebSocket requests whose URLs begin with `ws://` or `wss://`, you can use the WebSocket feature on ESA. By default, the WebSocket feature is enabled. You do not need to separately configure the feature. After the feature is enabled, ESA can communicate with the origin server over the WebSocket protocol to transmit and update data in real time.
	gRPC	gRPC is an open source high performance Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework that is developed based on HTTP/2. Using the protocol buffers (Protobuf) messaging format to serialize structured data, gRPC can connect services across languages and platforms and allows you to request a service from a remote server the same way you request an on-premises application. gRPC can also help users reduce bandwidth usage and network latency.
	Maximum upload size	The maximum upload size feature can be used to specify the maximum size of data that users can upload in a single request. This feature provides a flexible and efficient tool for administrators to limit the size of files to be uploaded and helps improve server performance and reduce operational costs.