Answers from the article - the "extra" protocol is just HTTP/1.1 and the reason for a load balancer is the ability to have multiple servers:

> But also the complexity of deployment. HTTP/2 is fully encrypted, so you need all your application servers to have a key and certificate, that’s not insurmountable, but is an extra hassle compared to just using HTTP/1.1, unless of course for some reasons you are required to use only encrypted connections even over LAN.

> So unless you are deploying to a single machine, hence don’t have a load balancer, bringing HTTP/2 all the way to the Ruby app server is significantly complexifying your infrastructure for little benefit.