Amazon Web Services announced that its CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) now supports HTTPS DNS records through Route 53, enabling browsers to establish HTTP/3 connections without the traditional protocol discovery step.

The addition aims to address a longstanding performance bottleneck where browsers must first connect via HTTP/2 to receive protocol upgrade information through Alt-Svc headers, before then establishing a new HTTP/3 connection.

With HTTPS records, Amazon eliminates the need for such a round-trip in the connection establishment process and ultimately reduces complexity in CDNs.

Major browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, already support HTTPS record queries by default, making the optimization immediately available to most web traffic.

According to AWS, CloudFront users can now configure Route 53 alias HTTPS records to point directly to their distributions, which the cloud giant claims eliminates costs for some of the most common DNS record types, including A, AAAA, and HTTPS.

“This is especially impactful not only for large enterprises with global traffic, but also for startups aiming to scale,” according to an AWS blog post. “It provides valuable peace of mind by eliminating charges for the most common DNS record queries as their usage grows.”

The update comes amid broader industry adoption of HTTP/3 over QUIC protocols, which promise reduced latency through connection multiplexing. However, the protocol upgrade process has remained a performance barrier for real-world deployments.

“Eliminating unnecessary connection setup round-trip allows CloudFront to deliver content more quickly and efficiently to end users,” the Amazon experts wrote. “HTTPS record support on CloudFront is available today in all edge locations.”