Spring Boot currently documents explicitly that it does not support h2c (i.e. HTTP/2 in the clear, no encryption). There are sound policy reasons for this as a default position, particularly assuming that the Spring Boot application faces the internet.

However, this complicates the adoption of Spring Boot for service mesh use cases where an L7 proxy (e.g. Envoy) is actually managing certificates and encrypted connections across the network, and the connection between the service and the proxy is just host-local. In this case, h2c between the proxy and the service is the most appropriate technical choice.

Is there not a case for allowing h2c via configuration for these use cases?