HTTP(S) has also become an hourglass, in a sense. Given the choice to implement a brand-new socket-level protocol or figure out how to shoehorn a service into R

HTTP(S) has also become an hourglass, in a sense. Given the choice to implement a brand-new socket-level protocol or figure out how to shoehorn a service into RESTful APIs accessible via HTTP, there are a lot of incentives to doing the latter (among others: corporate firewalls can tend to block other ports outbound by default, but frequently have to leave port 80 and port 22 traffic unmolested to not seriously break everyone's user experience).