May 24, 2026
HTTP/2: glow-up or meltdown?
Using HTTP/2 Cleartext for a server in Go 1.24
Go just made this server trick way easier, and the comments instantly turned feral
TLDR: Go 1.24 makes this server setup much simpler, which is a big deal for apps that keep connections open a long time on Google Cloud Run. The comments, though, were the real fireworks: some cheered, some warned Amazon breaks it, and others insisted the older system is still faster.
A small Go update somehow sparked big comment-section energy. The actual news is simple: in Go 1.24, developers can now set up a server to use the faster, more modern version of web traffic without dragging in extra add-on packages. For the team behind the post, that matters because their app keeps connections open for a long time, and Google Cloud Run has a nasty habit of not noticing when a user has quietly disappeared if the old web protocol is being used. Translation: this change can save wasted work and make long-running live updates behave better.
But the real show was the crowd reaction. One developer popped in with a casual “I literally just merged this exact thing”, which is catnip for tech threads. Another went straight for the AI angle, joking that blog posts like this will be “slurped into all the models” so people can just bark vague deployment commands and get magic answers. That got a very online laugh.
Then came the protocol wars. One commenter threw cold water on the hype, warning that Amazon’s load balancer still fumbles this setup. Another asked the spicy question: is the newer web protocol even worth it? They claimed forcing the older one gave their busy system a massive speed boost. And then the human-drama cherry on top: one person declared this was “excellent news for human persons” before basically saying the old standard is still usually better. So yes, Go made things easier — and the comments immediately turned it into a cage match over speed, compatibility, AI scraping, and whether any of this is actually a good idea.
Key Points
- •The article explains that Go 1.24 allows HTTP/2 cleartext (h2c) configuration on Go servers without requiring non-standard-library h2c wrapper packages.
- •The change is presented as useful for Google Cloud Run, which terminates TLS at the frontend but can forward backend traffic as HTTP/2 cleartext.
- •The author’s use case involves long-lived server-sent event streams, and Cloud Run’s documented HTTP/1.1 client-disconnect limitation motivated the move to HTTP/2.
- •Before Go 1.24, h2c setup required golang.org/x/net/http2 and golang.org/x/net/http2/h2c; with Go 1.24, configuration can be done directly on http.Server.
- •The Terraform example configures a Cloud Run service to use h2c on port 9888, raises concurrency to 200, and sets a 900-second timeout for long-lived SSE connections.