Caching the uncacheable: CloudFlare's Railgun

Introduced Railgun, a premium service for Business and Enterprise customers, designed to optimize the delivery of dynamically generated or personalized web pages that are typically uncacheable. Railgun works by establishing a permanent, TLS-secured TCP connection between a sender component in Cloudflare data centers and a listener component installed at the customer's network. This connection uses a binary multiplexing protocol to run multiple HTTP requests asynchronously. By recognizing that dynamic pages change slowly, Railgun compresses differences between page versions, achieving significantly higher compression ratios than standard gzip. This effectively makes almost all web content cacheable for premium customers.